Even after achieving the status of a developed economy, many economies face other challenges which may include economic stagnation and income inequality. The book looks at how a mature economy can continue to weather challenges and how the growth of living standards will depend on productivity growth through Singapore's experience. After Singapore's rapid economic transformation, the nation is at a crossroads. The book explains how productivity growth in turn depends on technological diffusion from abroad as well as indigenous innovation. It also examines how the design of policy to develop indigenous innovation to promote economic dynamism may come with creative destruction and disruptive effects on jobs and wages. The Singapore Economy provides insight into how we can maintain social cohesion and establish a political equilibrium that embraces the new sources of growth through policy formulation for economic inclusion.

Even after achieving the status of a developed economy, many economies face other challenges which may include economic stagnation and income inequality. The book looks at how a mature economy can continue to weather challenges and how the growth of living standards will depend on productivity growth through Singapore's experience. After Singapore's rapid economic transformation, the nation is at a crossroads. The book explains how productivity growth in turn depends on technological diffusion from abroad as well as indigenous innovation. It also examines how the design of policy to develop indigenous innovation to promote economic dynamism may come with creative destruction and disruptive effects on jobs and wages. The Singapore Economy provides insight into how we can maintain social cohesion and establish a political equilibrium that embraces the new sources of growth through policy formulation for economic inclusion.

This book charts the fall of productivity and the rise of inequality within global economies and societies. Set out through a series of economic models, the impact of falling rates of productivity, particularly in the USA, are examined in relation to lowering interest rates, the lifting of the stock market, and an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth. The economic impact of COVID-19, including the increased tendency to work from home and renewed public debt pressures, are contextualised within broader issues of wage suppression and discontent within the labor force to highlight how average workers have been left behind. The rise of China and the geopolitical tensions that it has created is also discussed. This book sets out the macro and microeconomic innovations that can create a revival in productivity growth in the coming years. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in global economic trends and the political economy.

The world's increasing integration through trade and the persistence of high unemployment in Europe, and other areas of the world, highlight the need to understand the implications of free trade for unemployment. Trade, Jobs and Wages analyses how employment levels and real wages are affected by international trade. Popular trade theory disregards the impact of free trade on the rate of unemployment, since it assumes full employment at the outset. By focusing on the determinants of the natural rate of unemployment, Professor Hoon places an emphasis on real, as opposed to monetary, factors in accounting for long term trends in wages and unemployment. The author examines the influence of trade on jobs and wages in different theoretical settings, including the Ricardian and Heckscher-Ohlin models as well as models exhibiting imperfect competition and scale economies. The influence of trade on high wage jobs and wage inequalities is also discussed.

Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps and an international group of economists argue that economic health depends on the widespread presence of certain values, in particular individualism and self-expression. Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps has long argued that the high level of innovation in the lead nations of the West was never a result of scientific discoveries plus entrepreneurship, as Schumpeter thought. Rather, modern values—particularly the individualism, vitalism, and self-expression prevailing among the people—fueled the dynamism needed for widespread, indigenous innovation. Yet finding links between nations’ values and their dynamism was a daunting task. Now, in Dynamism, Phelps and a trio of coauthors take it on. Phelps, Raicho Bojilov, Hian Teck Hoon, and Gylfi Zoega find evidence that differences in nations’ values matter—and quite a lot. It is no accident that the most innovative countries in the West were rich in values fueling dynamism. Nor is it an accident that economic dynamism in the United States, Britain, and France has suffered as state-centered and communitarian values have moved to the fore. The authors lay out their argument in three parts. In the first two, they extract from productivity data time series on indigenous innovation, then test the thesis on the link between values and innovation to find which values are positively and which are negatively linked. In the third part, they consider the effects of robots on innovation and wages, arguing that, even though many workers may be replaced rather than helped by robots, the long-term effects may be better than we have feared. Itself a significant display of creativity and innovation, Dynamism will stand as a key statement of the cultural preconditions for a healthy society and rewarding work.

As Singapore progresses from a newly-independent nation to a more mature economy, the economic challenges it faces have evolved.In the 50 years following Singapore's independence, the country tackled economic challenges relating to a fledgling nation, that included launching onto a path of economic take-off, and managing workers' wage aspirations without rising unemployment. It met those challenges, successfully transiting from relative poverty in the 1960s to relative prosperity today.As the country enters the next phase of its economic development, having now surpassed the US standard of living as measured by real GDP per capita, it faces another set of challenges: How to transit from catch-up growth arising from technological diffusion from frontier economies, to generating indigenous innovation? How to face the problem of a shrinking local workforce? How to manage a shift in job preferences with rising wealth and educational attainments?This volume provides a theory of Singapore's economic development. With a coherent theory capable of explaining how Singapore got to where it is, the book analyses how the future might look like for the Singapore economy. With its forward-looking analysis, this book is valuable to students as it weaves macroeconomic data together with growth theory and highlights the interaction of economic forces with social influences and political institutions. It also serves as a good reference for other emerging economies that, like Singapore, want to avoid the middle-income trap, and for researchers interested in analysing the economic possibilities for current and future Singaporeans.