Estimating fundamental and affordable housing price trends: a study based on Singapore

Policy-makers often impose some cooling measures on the housing market when housing prices rise fast. Such policies yield limited success if housing prices are driven up by fundamentals. Estimating a fundamental price trend from observed price data is a challenge. We present an empirical methodology to separate housing price trends into fundamental and affordable components. Deviating from the common practice, we replace current income by a long-run income measure constructed from household incomes at different quantiles. This income measure provides a more suitable basis for constructing affordable house price levels. It also serves as a better fundamental variable, especially for segmented housing markets like that of Singapore. These price trends provide policy-makers with useful information to intervene into property markets to achieve desirable outcomes. Analysing Singapore data using this methodology shows the magnitudes of the price gaps between actual and fundamental prices and how housing affordability fluctuates over price cycles.     

Rates of return to education and income distribution

Summary This paper examines the relationship between rate of return to education and income distribution with the help of cross-nation data on 30 developing and developed countries. The results indicate that the higher income groups in the society benefit the higher the rate of return to any level of education, and the bottom 40 percent and the middle 40 percent income groups lose; and the disadvantage for the poor income groups is the least at the primary level of education. As higher rates of return to education suggest higher levels of income inequalities, rapid expansion of the education system may reduce income inequalities through decline in rates of return to education. Secondly, it is also argued here that since high income groups benefit from all levels of education, education investments targeted specifically towards the poor may be preferred to overall investment in education.The author is Consultant, the World Bank, Washington D.C., 20433 (USA), while on leave from the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi. The incisive comments of George Psacharopoulos, Rati Ram, and the Editor(s) of this Journal on earlier versions of this study are gratefully acknowledged. However, the views expressed here and the errors that remain are the responsibility of the author alone and should not necessarily be attributed to anyone else, including the World Bank.     

Old-age dependency: is it really increasing in aging populations?

To account for economic dependency we propose an adjustment to the old-age dependency ratio based on savings of the elderly. Computations are simple and the adjusted ratio is aimed at retaining the exogenous character of the conventional demographic ratio. Data from an economy with stagnating incomes and a fast growing elderly population (Japan) and an economy with fast growing incomes (Singapore) highlight that the conventional dependency ratio substantially exaggerates the burden of the elderly.     

Electronics and growth cycles in Singapore

With the help of spectral and structural time series analyses it is found that the demand for electronics in the USA goes through a cycle with a period of about four to five years. Because of the synchronized nature of the electronics market, the global demand for electronics is likely to follow a similar cycle. The electronics cycle is unlikely to be caused by a regular business cycle. The major cause of the electronics cycle appears to be a product cycle which results from the introduction of new products to the market. As a result countries like Singapore which depend heavily on electronics exports may face roller coaster rides, especially in their manufacturing growth. Product diversification is the best solution to the problem.     

A segmented trend model to assess fiscal sustainability: The US experience 1929–2009

The academic literature has focused largely on testing for long-run fiscal sustainability. In this exercise we formulate a flexible regression model that can be used to assess the sustainability of a more recent build-up of fiscal deficits and debt that would be of major concern to policy makers. The analysis of US data shows that, after adjusting for some fundamentals, the gross Federal debt–income ratio has been growing at an unsustainable rate of 4 % per year since 2007. The net debt–income ratio does not show such a significant trend. Since not all government assets are readily available to reduce debt, significant positive trends in the gross debt–income ratio calls for policy actions.     

Forecasting Singapore's quarterly GDP with monthly external trade

In this paper we suggest a methodology to formulate a dynamic regression with variables observed at different time intervals. This methodology is applicable if the explanatory variables are observed more frequently than the dependent variable. We demonstrate this procedure by developing a forecasting model for Singapore's quarterly GDP based on monthly external trade. Apart from forecasts, the model provides a monthly distributed lag structure between GDP and external trade, which is not possible with quarterly data.     

On General and Specific Transfers for Child Support in Divorce

In a post-divorce equilibrium under joint legal custody of a child the paper compares the effect of two different transfer schemes, a general purpose transfer scheme and a specific purpose transfer scheme, from non-custodial parent to the custodial parent of the child on his/her welfare. Surprisingly, it finds that the marginal effects are neutral. The result contributes to the policy framework by suggesting that the lawyers/courts can choose the two alternatives equivalently in settling the child custody cases in a post-divorce situation. The paper also characterizes such transfer schemes and proves that the schemes can never restore the child’s welfare at the ‘happy marriage’ equilibrium level.