Articles by Mukul G Asher

Financial innovations, exemplified by the increasing complexity and variety of financial instruments, and the emergence of new financial players such as sovereign wealth funds have led to an unprecedented increase in global financial assets and flows. While these changes have brought about improved liquidity, reduced transaction costs and more risk management options, they have created major challenges for macroeconomic policymakers. As incidents of financial disruption and volatility increase and as their economic costs become significant, ensuring financial stability has become a major preoccupation of central banks.

This paper argues that India's unilateral liberalisation policies since the early 1990s, and purposeful and strategic pursual of its Look East Policy have resulted in considerably greater integration with the rest of Asia than is commonly realised or acknowledged. Moreover, the enabling conditions for greater economic integration among major Asian economies have been laid. If Asia is to increase its economic and political weight in world affairs, India's involvement would have to be an integral part of the Asia-wide cooperation. It is in this context that closer cooperation among Japan, ASEAN, South Korea, India and China would provide considerable win-win opportunities and will have far-ranging implications for the world.

Singapore is now an affluent and rapidly aging society. It is also searching for ways to regain competitiveness in the face of globalisation and increasing competition from other countries. Even as the need for adequate social security provision is growing, Singapore's strong revealed preference for use of the central provident fund for socio-economic engineering and for political control are creating many dilemmas centring around governance, design of schemes, investment policies and whether to shift to a more appropriate multi-tier system.

There is a strong case for setting up a separate regulatory agency, the Provident and Pension Funds Authority (PPFA). The PPFA will be in a better position to address the limitations of the current, rather fragmented, pension system and help develop a robust pensions industry than either the status quo or entrusting the task to one of the existing agencies.

This paper analyses selected aspects of the rote of the state in Singapore. Over the last three decades, Singapore has been able to combine good macro-economic performance and good social and demographic indicators with authoritarian policy and corporatist management. Singapore has used market as an instrument rather than as a mechanism: