Chart of the Week October 20, 2022: The global surge in Digital Payments

Summary: A comparison between emerging economies across different geographical regions and high-income economies reveals the colossal magnitude of the digital payments revolution. The closer the economies are to the top-left corner, the stronger their growth in digital payments usage between 2014 and 2021. The concentration of high-income countries in the top-right corner reflects a well-established […]

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Chart of the Week October 7, 2022: Tariff Reduction and Trade in the CPTPP

Summary: The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) strives to deepen trade liberalization in goods and services among 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific region (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam). It aims to eliminate and reduce up to 98% of tariffs. However, three years after CPTPP […]

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Chart of the Week September 9, 2022: R&D Innovation in Singapore

Summary: The patent application data from PATSTAT over the period 2010 to 2019 reveal that high-tech patent applications have exponentially risen in Singapore, suggesting forward-looking innovation in Singapore’s R&D. In contrast, patents applications in other tech levels remain largely stable. The increase in high-tech patent applications was further propelled by government initiatives to strengthen innovation […]

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Chart of the Week August 26, 2022: India’s UPI-led Digital Payments Revolution

Summary: Over the past few years, digital payments witnessed exponential growth in India, driven by payments via the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) which was launched as a pilot project in 2016 by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). The volume and value of UPI-based transactions grew by 50 and 75 times, respectively from FY […]

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Chart of the Week August 12, 2022: Political ideology and the odds of US M&A announcement

Summary: This graph is taken from a study about US mergers and acquisitions, also featured in the Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. This study hypothesizes and finds that the probability of announcement of an M&A increases when merging firms have more similar organizational political ideologies*, because organizations drift toward member homogenization as […]

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Chart of the Week July 15, 2022: Greater Bay Area Integration: Reallocation of Foreign Direct Investments

Summary: The Chinese government officially launched the integration of the Greater Bay Area in 2017, with the aim of building Hong Kong, Macau and nine mainland cities into a competitive urban agglomeration. With the advancement of this strategy, inward FDI flows increased to other GBA cities as well.  Post the Covid-19 pandemic, the recovery in […]

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Chart of the Week July 1, 2022: Changing Demand for Skills in the Singapore Labour Market

Summary: Asia Competitiveness Institute partnered JobTech to analyse real-time trends in the Singapore labour market. Our study of the job posting data from 2018 to 2021 finds the largest increase in demand for skills related to the STEM fields, such as scripting languages (Python), programming languages (Java), and software development. In contrast, the demand for […]

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Chart of the Week June 17, 2022: Consumption Reallocation during COVID-19

Summary: The pandemic has changed consumers’ habit. The overall retail sales in Singapore have recovered to the pre-pandemic level, but some sectors are still lagging. Instead of dining in the restaurants, some have opted to buy more from the supermarkets. The greater dispersion in retail sales indices imply reallocations of consumption among Singaporean consumers. Whether […]

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