ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

Singapore was born on 9 Aug 1965 and ASEAN was formed on 8 August 1967. This post takes a look at the economies of Singapore and its ASEAN neighbors.  Singapore’s small land area and population belies its economic   heft.  The following images illustrates Singapore’s economic status in ASEAN and its contributions to the ASEAN economy. The objective of this post is to show that in the mayhem generated  by Trumpian fake Economics, and MAGA geopolitical tensions with China, ASEAN is by itself an economic power house with its 670 million population (8.4% of World population) and US$3.8 trillion GDP (3.5% of World GDP, 5th largest economy in the World).  ASEAN is also China’s largest trading partner accounting for 17% of China’s total trade- and that is an important fact to take note of when dealing with an isolationist USA. The statistics on Singapore’s economic status within ASEAN serves to point out the role that Singapore can play in navigating ASEAN through...

CAN SINGAPORE’S LABOR PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVE MUCH FURTHER? Not a day passes without an exhortation from our government to increase productivity (especially labour productivity). So how is labour productivity usually measured? It is: Total Output /Total Man Hours Worked. Total Output of a country is its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is the Value Add of the economy without double counting outputs which are also inputs to another activity. The charts below show statistics on average daily wage cost (US$) and Labour Productivity in Manufacturing (US$) of ASEAN countries plus China  Chart 1 shows two types of column bars representing average daily wage cost and labour productivity both measured in US$. *Numbers taken from McKinsey Global Institute. This chart roughly shows that Wage Cost and Productivity have a very strong correlation. That is, higher productivity goes with higher wages and vice versa, though we are not saying whether it is the tail that wags the dog or dog t...