Role Of Singapore Research Articles

Shades of grey: the legal trade in CITES-listed birds in Singapore, notably the globally threatened African grey parrot Psittacus erithacus

AbstractThere are few published studies quantifying the volume of wildlife being traded through Singapore. We report on Singapore's involvement in the trade of avifauna listed on CITES based on government-reported data to CITES, with particular emphasis on Singapore's role in the trade of the globally threatened African grey parrot Psittacus erithacus. During 2005–2014 Singapore reported commercial import permits for 225,561 birds, from 35 countries, listed on CITES Appendices I and II, and the export of 136,912 similarly listed birds to 37 countries, highlighting the country's role as a major international transshipment hub for the global aviculture industry. Major exporters to Singapore included the Solomon Islands, the Netherlands, Taiwan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Africa. Major importers from Singapore included Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Japan. Singapore imported significant quantities of CITES-listed birds from African countries, including the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea and South Africa, a number of which have a history of abuse of CITES export permits, discrepancies in reported trade data, or an acknowledged lack of wildlife law enforcement capacity. Significant discrepancies were detected between import and export figures of CITES-listed avifauna reported by Singapore and its trading partners. Based on these findings we present three recommendations to improve the regulation and monitoring of the trade in CITES-listed bird species in Singapore.

Bank Regulation in Singapore

This article discusses the most important principles of one of the most relevant financial markets in the world—Singapore. While little affected by the Global Financial Crisis, Singapore is currently reforming the regulatory framework for banks operating in its territory, both nationally and foreign headquartered. This contribution starts by providing some brief information on the structure of the Singaporean banking sector and its regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore. The main discussion focuses on the principles of bank regulation, especially in comparison to the rules of the Third Basel Accord (Basel III). This part is followed by the principles that apply to banks in crises and Singapore's role in cooperation with regulators from other jurisdictions. This last section includes an analysis of Singapore's willingness to participate in transnational efforts that seek to address the challenges resulting from the activities of global systemically important banks.

Advertising Community: Union Times and Singapore’s Vernacular Public Sphere, 1906–1939

Newspapers have long played an important role in Singapore’s vernacular public sphere. Drawing on scholarly work in the fields of sociology, economics, history, and communications, this paper analyzes advertisements in the Chinese-language newspaper Zonghui bao (Union times) between 1908 and 1941. At the most simple level, advertisers told consumers what to wear, ingest, and drive. Additionally, ads defined worldviews, gender relations, and cross-cultural associations. However, advertisers also responded to the needs and demands of their audience. It was within this public sphere between seller and consumer that Singapore’s multiethnic society developed.

PUBLIC FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT IN SINGAPORE: KEY CHARACTERISTICS AND PROSPECTS

Public financial management (PFM) has played an important role in Singapore's remarkable economic success since its independence. This paper analyzes select characteristics of Singapore's PFM strategy and prospects for their continuation. An underlying theme has been ensuring that PFM is consistent with and enables Singapore's location-based growth strategy. Other characteristics include conducting economic activities outside the conventional government budget giving rise to a much larger role for the public sector than reflected in the budget; extensive use of non-conventional sources of revenue such as from the lease of land, creating property and usage rights to generate tax-like revenue; and limited social risk pooling in financing national spending on healthcare and pensions. As Singapore's business-location-based strategy reaches its limits, and an affluent and ageing population aspires for greater economic and social security, transparency, and effective participation in public policies, current PFM practices will need to undergo significant changes towards a more citizen-centric governance focus. Policymakers' response will not be constrained by lack of fiscal resources, or by institutional and organizational capacities.

Mobility and desire: international students and Asian regionalism in aspirational Singapore

Higher education is playing an important role in Singapore's most recent cycle of modernization: to re-make itself into a global city through the continued accumulation of capital, ‘talent,’ and knowledge. This paper is a critical analysis of the accounts of a group of international students enrolled at the National University of Singapore, a key strategic site in Singapore's bid to reconfigure itself into a knowledge hub. We discuss international student negotiations of Singapore's global city imaginings against a policy context that foregrounds a desire for regional students in the state's imagination and aspiration. In inquiring what political work international education is called upon to do to further Singapore's progressive developmentalism, we open up an analytical space for understanding the global city as both a cosmopolitan metropolis that is continually being refashioned by the desires and aspirations of new student actors, and a place of transit from which students leave having acquired valuable navigational capacities.

The Group of Twenty: Input and Output Legitimacy, Reforms, and Agenda

The Group of Twenty (G-20) deserves credit for opening up of the “top table†of global governance to a wider representation of countries on a geographic basis in general and Asia in particular. As both a crisis committee in terms of the reverberations from the 2008 financial crisis and a potential global steering committee for a wider set of economic/developmental issues the summit process includes not only the association of leading association of leading emerging economies referred to as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, the Republic of China, and South Africa), but key middle powers such as the Republic of Korea. Yet, as a growing body of literature attests, it is clearly the contested nature of the G-20 that has come to the fore. This paper examines both the strengths and weaknesses of the G-20 from the perspective of input and output legitimacy. Notwithstanding some initial successes the constraints with respect to “output†have become more acute. Moreover, the “input†legitimacy of the G-20 has been eroded by the absence of the United Nations in the design and representational gaps. On the basis of this analysis the paper examines the debates and makes specific policy recommendations by which regionalism, the engagement of small states (through the role of Singapore and the 3-G coalition), and the expansion of the agenda can be utilized as a dynamic of reform for the G-20 without eroding the core strengths in terms of informality and issue-specific focus of the forum.

Television News in Singapore: Mediating Conflict and Consent

AbstractSingapore's television media, notwithstanding the island's economic successes, is widely considered to be tightly controlled and regulated by the government. The role of Singapore's television news in enabling or curtailing democratic processes, however, remains largely unnoticed and under-theorised. This article reports on recent research which secures added empirical purchase on Singapore's TV journalism today and does so by identifying, mapping and pursuing into the production domain the repertoire of communicative frames that differentially characterise contemporary TV news in Singapore. Our findings document that there is considerably more complexity in the ecology and communicative frames of TV news than has so far been acknowledged or explored and these complexities have direct bearing on debates about the mediation of conflict and consent in Singapore's brand of 'democracy'.

A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF PAST INVESTIGATIONS INTO SINGAPORE'S SAVING BEHAVIOR

This article aims to show that the literature so far has not been able to present a statistically robust answer to the question of what drove Singapore's spectacular savings rates. A substantial part of the literature — particularly earlier studies — must be rejected on methodological grounds since the time-series properties of the respective data series were not taken into consideration when choosing the appropriate testing method. Others have omitted potentially crucial determinants of savings or have wrongly disaggregated Gross National Savings. This unsatisfactory state of investigation into Singapore's saving behavior is unfortunate because savings play such a central role in Singapore's economic history since the country's independence. For future research the article also supplies new data series, which disaggregate Singapore's national savings after taking the country's peculiarities into consideration. The critical assessment is also intended as a guideline to future researchers of which mistakes to avoid and where potential pitfalls lie.

Unlocking the potential of the ASEAN – EU partnership. The role of Singapore

Unlocking the potential of the ASEAN – EU partnership. The role of Singapore

The Role of Singapore in ASEAN

The idea for this paper became more and more plausible when I spent a brief period of time in each of the five countries in the Associa tion of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the summer of 1980. As a member of a group of ten American academics, I was sent to the area to exchange views, debate the issues, defend or condemn U.S. policy, and learn about the five countries individually and about as an organization. One of the major themes was the concept of consensus in ASEAN, another the ASEAN spirit of co-opera tion. These are necessary devices enabling all five countries to reconcile different national interests, patterns of development, and styles. In all five countries, Singapore was mentioned as the one mem ber that was not likely to be in complete agreement on most major issues.

Trade Unions as Agents for Skill Formation: The Case of Singapore

Trade unions can influence the quality and quantity of training provided to workers. This article delineates the role played by unions in Singapore’s skill formation system, during the 1980s and 1990s. This role is framed by the context of the developmental state and of a collaborationist union movement. Singapore unions act to support the state’s drive to upgrade the skills of the workforce. They put pressure on employers to sign up to collective agreements including statements about training, and they act as both agents and providers of training and education for basic and core skills. They also devote considerable resources to persuading their members to take up training opportunities. What evidence there is suggests that these various strategies have had some success. The unions’ role in Singapore is contrasted with their role in some other countries.

TRANSPORTATION AND TERRITORIAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE SINGAPORE EXTENDED METROPOLITAN REGION

This paper examines the interface between port cities, urban regions and their transportation systems with respect to Singapore. The development of the regional Singaporean transactional space incorporates the province of Johor in Malaysia and the Riau islands in Indonesia, with the resulting spatial pattern and linkages forming an Extended Metropolitan Region (EMR). An EMR spatial model is presented in which transportation is a key factor. This model explains four processes of territorial development — densification, dissemination, extension and contraction. Densification is a process of spatial accumulation of economic activities within an area and aims at higher levels of productivity. Dissemination is a spatial relocation of unproductive economic activity towards productive areas. Extension is a space/time collapse enabling economic activities to extend over a large territory while maintaining low distribution costs. Contraction is a rationalisation of distribution systems facing growing transportation costs and competition from other systems. Based on the framework provided by the spatial model and available evidence, an assessment of transportation and territorial development in the Singapore EMR is undertaken. The analysis underlines the role of Singapore as a regional transhipment centre and its maritimefland interface function.

Regionalization of Trade in the Asia-Pacific: A Statistical Approach

Despite the integration of the East and Southeast Asian economies into the world economy there is a clear trend towards regionalization of foreign trade in Asia-Pacific. A method that used hierarchical cluster analysis and bilateral trade flows has identified two economic regions in the Asia-Pacific: firstly a Northeast Asian region encompassing Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China, Hong Kong and the United States as a non-Asian nation, and secondly a Southeast Asian group of countries including Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand. Though the latter seems to overlap with the ASEAN group of countries, the analysis of trade links within the Southeast Asian group points to the fact that the trade integration within that group is not a result of institutional integration schemes but is due to the Singapore's role as a trade and service centre for the Southeast Asian region.

Economic impact of tourism in Singapore

This paper uses input-output methodology to analyze the economic impact of Singapore's tourist industry and to evaluate its prospects for development. The overall impact has been favorable and current plans for tourism promotion are in thr right direction. Singapore's role as a gateway into the region is being eclipsed because of development of tourist sectors in more land-abundant countries, as well as its own diversification into an international business and convention hub. Growth in tourism is constrained by more than labor and capacity such as hotel rooms, other facilities, and availability of plane seats. As tourism is personalized and service-oriented, Singapore needs to continue its human resource development.

Bookkeeping barter, money, credit, and Singapore's international rice trade, 1870–1939

A major part of the international rice trade has remained obscure because historians have hitherto failed to understand Singapore's role in it. This article shows how the rice trade was organized and financed through Singapore by means of a system of barter which combined Singapore's roles as an entrepot for the West and for the region. The article emphasizes the regional aspect of the port's commerce and argues that rice as the basis for regional entrepot trade was fundamental to the economic development of Singapore and to its growth as an Anglo-Chinese city.

The Minerals Industries of ASEAN and Australia: Problems and Prospects.

Minerals in the economies of the ASEAN countries and Australia the ASEAN-Australia trade pattern in fuels and minerals issues in minerals policy ASEAN-Australia interests in mineral commodity associations and agreements the minerals industry in Australia mineral and energy development in Indonesia mineral trade and economic development in Malaysia the Philippine minerals industry, development and trade the changing role of Singapore in the trading and processing of mineral resources minerals and energy in Thailand - production, consumption and trade.

The changing role of refiners in Singapore

Refineries in Singapore will bear the brunt of increased competition from OPEC product exports. With expanded storage facilities, however, Singapore's role as an oil trading center will be expanded to attract new spot-processing business. Singapore refiners hope that many oil-producing nations, as well as traders, will process crude oil in Singapore and sell it on the growing spot-products market. The declining processing costs in Singapore may even persuade some neighboring countries to defer plans for adding new refining capacities.

Singapore in 1974: Consolidation amidst Uncertainties

Since her separation from the Federation of Malaysia in August 1965 to become an independent republic, Singapore has sought various strategies to ensure her political and economic viability. Unlike many other developing countries, Singapore is in many ways a city-state. Restricted to a territorial area of 585 square kilometres and with a population of two million, Singapore does not have any significant hinterland. As most of her people live in the urban area, employment and income must thus be largely generated from non-agricultural activities. Traditionally Singapore's role has been that of performing entrepot and dis tributive services for Southeast Asian countries. This role has declined in importance over the last two decades, mainly because of the deliberate policies of economic nationalism (and direct trading) of neighbouring countries. Since the People's Action Party (PAP) took over power in 1959, there has been the deliberate restructuring of the economic base from entrep?t to industrial. The activities of the Economic Development Board and the rapid development of infrastructural facilities in new industrial sites thus began in earnest. The merger with Malaya and the British colonies in Borneo to form the Federation of Malaysia in 1963, too, represented an attempt to seek long-term economic viability through a larger political and economic framework. The separation from Malaysia in 1965 did not remove the need to embark on accelerated industrialization; in fact, separation reaffirmed the over whelming importance of avoiding becoming hostage to the vicissitudes of regional events. Industrialization and an economy oriented to a global, as opposed to a regional, market would constitute key features of Singapore's survival exercise. Since separation, the government has embarked on an even more intensive campaign to induce a greater flow of foreign investments. Between 1965 and 1971, the amount of foreign investments rose tenfold from SS157 million to SS1,572*5 million. Partly facilitated by the tightening of labour and industrial relations regula tions (the Employment Act and the Industrial Relations (Amendment) Act of 1968 helped to ensure industrial peace), foreign investments were regarded as important from three aspects. Firstly, such investments (partly because they come from well established multinational corporations) meant that ready export markets for locally produced industrial products would be available. Singapore could also benefit from technology-transfer and the results of research and development of these

The Future Role of Singapore

The Future Role of Singapore

The Landward Side of Singapore

BRITAIN'S bastion in the East traditionally defends a vast territory to the north which stretches far beyond British political control, but lies easily within the sphere of imperial interests. Burma, a Crown Colony like the Straits Settlements, falls clearly within the scheme of empire defense as India's eastern bulwark, and Thailand, directly to the north, is an independent country with close geographic, economic and historical bonds with British Malaya. Pre-Japanese Indochina had comparatively few economic ties with lands to the south. It was closely controlled politically by France, which established during the first months of the European war tight-knit relations with the Far Eastern fortress of her ally, Great Britain. Until Japan's recent thrust into Southeastern Asia, it was assumed that the interests of all these countries were identical with those of Singapore-the maintenance of the status quo in this remote corner of the globe. Singapore, the Lion City of the ancient seafaring Malays, was reborn a little over a century ago under the prophetic impetus of Sir Stamford Raffles. Probably his decision to create a free trading post controlling the main seaway between China and India did not foresee its phenomenal development as entrepot centre for the exchange of Malaysia's products against those of Europe and the farther East. Nor could he possibly have imagined the recent overshadowing of Singapore's exchange commerce by its growth as the greatest Oriental market for tin and rubber. The economic nationalism which has universally developed during the past 20 years has effected a slow but visible decline in Singapore's role as middleman, at the same time that its growing dependence on food imports and on the rubber and tin produced in the adjacent Malay states oriented Singapore toward the mainland. Simultaneously the mainland has become more independent of Singapore. Burma, despite her administrative separation from India in 1937, has been more closely linked economically with India than before. Though