We draw attention to an apparent puzzle in the aggregate consumption behaviour of Singaporeans. In stark contrast to the rest of the world, the average propensity to consume has plummeted to a record low of two-fifths of income in 2000 leaving the economy without a good built-in stabilizer. This...

Temporally aggregated data is a bane for Granger causality tests. The same set of variables may lead to contradictory causality inferences at different levels of temporal aggregation. Obtaining temporally disaggregated data series is impractical in many situations. Since cointegration is...

Apart from aggregate accounting of Singapore’s investment abroad, case studies on the performance of these investments in individual countries hardly exist. This paper is an attempt to compile such a study by focusing on Singapore’s investment in Sri Lanka. Singapore is one of the largest...

Aided by strong economic growth the Singapore government has been able to keep both the tax rate and the government expenditure rate low and yet generate healthy budget surpluses year after year. Although the gap between the tax rate and the government expenditure rate is the obvious source of...

The existing measures of housing affordability are essentially short-run indicators that compare current income with property prices. Taking into consideration that a housing purchase is a long-horizon decision and the property price reflects the discounted present value of future mortgage...

Recurrent large fiscal deficits and accumulating public debt frequently ring alarm bells around the world on the sustainability of U.S. federal fiscal policy. The present-value borrowing constraint, which states that, for the fiscal policy to be sustainable the current debt stock should match...

This paper sheds further light on the debate spearheaded by Riedel (1988) on the specification of a small country export function. The theoretical and empirical analyses in the paper show that while the price-taker assumption cannot be rejected, the export function for Singapore should not be...

Many studies have examined the determinants of ethnic conflicts in multi-ethnic developing countries and report a myriad of contributory factors. It is natural to observe many correlates because ethnic wars tend to gain their own momentum and proceed for variety of reasons that are not directly...

Economists often have to use temporally aggregated data in causality tests. A number of theoretical studies have pointed out that temporal aggregation has distorting effects on causal inference. This paper provides a quantitative assessment of the magnitude of the distortions created by temporal...

The instrumental variable (IV) estimator in a cross-sectional or panel regression model is often taken to provide valid causal inference from contemporaneous correlations. In this exercise we point out that the IV estimator, like the OLS estimator, cannot be used effectively for causal inference...