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

Using SDRT to analyze pathological conversations. Logicality, rationality and pragmatic deviances

International audienceSchizophrenia is well-known among mental illnesses for the severity of the thought dis- orders it involves, and for their widespread and spectacular manifestations ranging from deviant social behavior to delusion, not to mention affective and sensory distortions. Confronted with such a pathological con- versation, any "ordinary" speaker intuitively feels that there are some incoherencies or discontinuities. The aim of this research is to account for these using both pragmatics and formal semantics. Linguistics, especially semantics and pragmatics, is thus central to this work

Tax reforms in East Asian developing countries: motivations, directions, and implications

Asian-Pacific Economic Literature3139-6

Pension reform in an affluent and rapidly ageing society: The Singapore case

Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics432105-11

Advice for India

Issues in Science and Technology23412-13ISTE

Mobilizing non-conventional budgetary resources in Asia in the 21st century

10.1016/j.asieco.2005.10.007Journal of Asian Economics166947-95

Singapore

Singapore’s single-tier, defined-contribution pension system is administered by the Central Provident Fund (CPF) which has nearly universal coverage. In 2010, however, the average balance per member was Singapore $57,000 which was approximately equivalent to the per capita income. This will not finance the 2 decades of retirement expected as the population ages in the next 20 years. Concerns about fairness arise from tax treatment, different designs for different groups of workers, the lack of social risk pooling, and the absence of pension arrangements for foreign workers. Broad directions for promoting fairness and sustainability are fairly clear: (i) using more social insurance principles and social risk pooling instruments such as social pensions; (ii) reforming the investment policies of the CPF by bringing them more in line with the military’s SAVER Plan; and (iii) improving the design of the CPF to promote fairness. The government has both the financial and administrative capacity to do this but has instead placed disproportionate importance on achieving high economic growth while not taking sufficient account of the negative implications on social protection. In the 2011 general election, nearly 40% of the electorate voted for opposition candidates. This could be interpreted as an urgent need for a more balanced approach to economic growth and social protection

India’s Social Security System: An Assessment

India is a federal country comprising 28 States and seven Union Territories. It gained independence in 1947. After following relatively inward-looking economic policies for several decades since gaining independence, India adopted an open-economy - open-society strategy of economic growth in 1991, with the aim of integrating with the world economy in a market-consistent manner (Kelkar, 2004). As India addresses the challenges of the twenty-first century and manages its rise globally, constructing and implementing a modern social security system represents one of its major imperatives. A modern social security system can enable India to cushion the burden on workers of restructuring public and private organizations; to increase the legitimacy of further reforms; and to encourage individuals and firms to engage in entrepreneurship and make creative career choices. All three are essential for India to emerge as a resilient knowledge-driven economy and society. This paper analyzes India’s social security system, with primary focus on pensions or retirement income arrangements. It also discusses reform themes which the policymakers and provident and pension fund organizations may consider in improving the sustainability, coverage and resilience to economic and other shocks of the current system. The paper is organized as follows. In section II, a broad overview of macroeconomic, demographic and labor market trends is provided. This is followed by a discussion of India’s current social security system and its various components in section III. As social security related services must be provided by organizations, this section also provides suggestions for improving their effectiveness. Section IV provides a brief overview of India’s healthcare financing system. The final section suggests five broad reform themes designed to transform the current system into a system more appropriate for meeting India’s social security challenges in the 21st century

Financing social protection in developing Asia: Issues and options

Demographic trends portend the rapid ageing of Developing Asia (DA), albeit at varying rates. This phenomenon, along with the need to extend coverage of social protection systems is likely to increase public and private expenditure on social protection, particularly for pensions and healthcare. This paper analyses the options for additional financing of social protection in DA. As total national and fiscal resources devoted to social protection increase, an important issue will be how the additional burden is shared between different sectors, and financing instruments. The paper, however, focuses on options to finance additional social protection expenditure. Three broad options are suggested: first, realizing efficiency gains in managing provident and pension fund organizations; second, design and service delivery innovations including better policy coordination and coherence within and amongst healthcare and pension programmes; third, developing capabilities to obtain resources from conventional and unconventional sources of budgetary revenue. The paper also stresses that complementary reforms in fiscal, labour market, financial and capital markets will be needed to manage rapid ageing in DA, and therefore the issue of ageing should be viewed as involving several economic and social arrangements, and not in isolation