This book provides an analysis of Singapore’s development and success as an international financial centre (IFC). Chapters demonstrate how Singapore plays a critical role in both Asian and global financial markets, despite its relatively small geographic size. The author focuses specifically on the factors that have contributed to the city-state’s success and discusses the policy lessons that can be derived from it. The book describes the historical, spatial, political and policy factors that contributed to Singapore’s development as a leading Asian financial centre and global city, and will be of interest to both policy scholars and practitioners.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Although modern civilization revolves around money, the nature of money is paradoxical. It is nothing more than a representation of and medium for decentralized networks of social trust, but its production is controlled by highly centralized networks of firms, places, and governments, and there is never enough of it to go around. Moreover, given that the creation of money, as credit, is based on expectations, money is at its heart an instrument for human agency to change the future. However, the financial systems that produce money are deeply rooted in the past, and perpetuate themselves through history. Sticky Power seeks to deepen our understanding of the paradox of money by introducing a novel conceptual lens, Global Financial Networks, to cast new light on the geography, history, politics, and sociology of finance from the Middle Ages to the global financial crisis and beyond. It shows that the power of finance is inherently sticky: apparently new innovations such as offshore finance actually date back centuries, and global financial networks more broadly have adapted to the rise and fall of empires and the development of new technologies while changing surprisingly little in their basic character, or at most changing very slowly. Haberly and Wójcik argue that a recognition of the mechanics of this durability calls for a new approach to reforming finance—one less reactively focused on regulation, and more proactively focused on building new institutional systems with a long-term sticky power of their own.
As well as marking the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the consequent unleashing of the global financial crisis, 2018 is also the year of negotiations on the terms of the UK's exit from the European Union. Within a decade the banking world has witnessed two epochal events with potential to redraw the map of international financial centres: but how much has this map actually changed since 2008, and how is it likely to change in the near future? International Financial Centres after the Global Financial Crisis and Brexit gathers together leading economic historians, geographers, and other social scientists to focus on the post-2008 developments in key international financial centres. It focuses on the shifting hierarchies of New York, London, Paris, Geneva, Zurich, Frankfurt, Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and Tokyo to question whether Asian financial centres have taken advantage of the crisis in the West. It also examines the medium-effects of the crisis, the level of regulation, and the rise of new technology (fintech). By exploring these crucial changes, it questions whether shifts in the financial industry and the global landscape will render these centres unnecessary for the functioning of the global economy, and which cities are likely to emerge as hubs of new financial technology.
The Ministry of Finance, Government of India established a High Powered Expert Committee in 2006 to study the feasibility of India's entry into the global market for international financial services and that of Mumbai becoming an international financial center. The Committee's report analyses Mumbai's strengths and weaknesses in terms of the above seven key factors essential for the success of an IFC. The report strives to deliver a nuanced appreciation of the likely costs and benefits of the path to an IFC, based on an understanding of which policy-makers can make a reasoned choice.
This edition of the OECD Sovereign Borrowing Outlook reviews developments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic for government borrowing needs, funding conditions and funding strategies in the OECD area.
The COVID-19 pandemic struck the global economy after a decade that featured a broad-based slowdown in productivity growth. Global Productivity: Trends, Drivers, and Policies presents the first comprehensive analysis of the evolution and drivers of productivity growth, examines the effects of COVID-19 on productivity, and discusses a wide range of policies needed to rekindle productivity growth. The book also provides a far-reaching data set of multiple measures of productivity for up to 164 advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies, and it introduces a new sectoral database of productivity. The World Bank has created an extraordinary book on productivity, covering a large group of countries and using a wide variety of data sources. There is an emphasis on emerging and developing economies, whereas the prior literature has concentrated on developed economies. The book seeks to understand growth patterns and quantify the role of (among other things) the reallocation of factors, technological change, and the impact of natural disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This book is must-reading for specialists in emerging economies but also provides deep insights for anyone interested in economic growth and productivity. Martin Neil Baily Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution Former Chair, U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers This is an important book at a critical time. As the book notes, global productivity growth had already been slowing prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and collapses with the pandemic. If we want an effective recovery, we have to understand what was driving these long-run trends. The book presents a novel global approach to examining the levels, growth rates, and drivers of productivity growth. For anyone wanting to understand or influence productivity growth, this is an essential read. Nicholas Bloom William D. Eberle Professor of Economics, Stanford University The COVID-19 pandemic hit a global economy that was already struggling with an adverse pre-existing condition—slow productivity growth. This extraordinarily valuable and timely book brings considerable new evidence that shows the broad-based, long-standing nature of the slowdown. It is comprehensive, with an exceptional focus on emerging market and developing economies. Importantly, it shows how severe disasters (of which COVID-19 is just the latest) typically harm productivity. There are no silver bullets, but the book suggests sensible strategies to improve growth prospects. John Fernald Schroders Chaired Professor of European Competitiveness and Reform and Professor of Economics, INSEAD
This book traces the roots of global financial integration in the first “modern” era of globalisation from 1880 to 1913 and can serve as a valuable tool to current-day policy dilemmas by using historical data to see which policies in the past led to enhanced international financing for development.
There is much speculation regarding a “race for dominance” among financial centers in Asia, arising from the anticipated financial opening up of China. This frame of reference is, to an extent, a predilection that results from a traditional understanding of financial centers as possessing historical, geographic, and scale economy advantages. This paper, however, suggests that there is an alternative prism through which the evolution of financial centers in Asia needs to be viewed. It underscores the importance of “complementarity” rather than “dominance” to better serve regional and global financial stability. We posit that such complementarity is vital, through network analysis of the roles of Hong Kong SAR and Singapore as the current leading financial centers in the region. This analysis suggests that a competition for dominance can result in de-stabilizing levels of interconnectivity that render the global “network” as a whole more susceptible to rapid propagation of shocks. We then examine the regulatory and policy challenges that may be encountered in furthering such complementary coexistence.
Many questions have been raised about America's status in the increasingly interconnected global economy. Yet key factsâ€"such as the amount of foreign assets abroad owned by U.S. citizensâ€"are not known. The crucial data needed to assess the U.S. position are unavailable. This volume explores significant shortcomings in U.S. data on international capital transactions and their implications for policymakers. The volume offers clearcut recommendations for U.S. agencies to bring data collection and analyses of the global economy into the twenty-first century. The volume explores: How factors emerging since the early 1980s have shaped world financial markets and revealed shortcomings in data collection and analysis. How the existing U.S. data system works and where it fails how measurements of international financial transactions are recorded; and how swaps, options, and futures present special reporting problems. How alternative methods, such as collecting data, from sources such as global custodians and international clearinghouses, might improve coverage and accuracy.
3-in-1: Governing a Global Financial Centre provides a comprehensive understanding of Singapore's past development and future success as a global financial centre. It focuses on three transformational processes that have determined the city-state's financial sector development and governance — globalisation, financialisation, and centralisation — and their impacts across three areas: the economy, governance, and technology. More importantly, this book takes a multidimensional approach by considering the inter-related and interdependent nature of these three transformational processes. Just like the 3-in-1 coffee mix that is such an ubiquitous feature of everyday life in Singapore, the individual ingredients of Singapore's success as a global financial centre do not act alone, but as an integrated whole that manifests itself in one final product: the global financial centre.
