samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  •  Foreign labour, which had driven Singapore’s labour force growth since the late 1970s, was already one-third of the total workforce. •  It was neither economically efficient nor socially desirable to allow the foreign workforce to expand much faster than the local workforce. By 2020, average total labour force growth was down to 1% per annum. The central thrust of economic strategies in the 2010s and early 2020s was therefore to shift to a productivity-driven growth model. The aim was to increase productivity growth to at least 2% per annum, from the 1.4% averaged during the 2000s. •  The growth of lower-skilled foreign labour was curbed through increases in the foreign worker levy and reductions in the foreign worker dependency ratio ceilings. •  Financial incentives were given to firms to undertake capital deepening and adopt technology solutions to raise productivity. •  Programmes were put in place to help Singaporeans develop and master skills in new growth clusters. While the manufacturing sector had continually undergone restructuring and moved up the value chain in the preceding five decades, this was the first time the entire economy was undergoing such a transition. •  It proved particularly challenging for many traditional domestically-oriented services like retail, hospitality, construction, real estate, and social services, which had come to be heavily dependent on cheap labour over the decades.

Singapore’s first Prime Minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, had said in 1957 that the idea of an independent Singapore was a “political, economic, and geographical absurdity”. It is not hard to see why. •  An island of 580 squares kilometres at low tide, Singapore in 1965 had no natural resources, no hinterland, no industry. •  It depended on the outside world not just for food and energy, but even water. •  Industrial strife was common. Unemployment was close to 9%. Singapore’s birth pangs were traumatic. •  Separation from Malaysia meant the loss of not just a common market but a hinterland. •  Indonesia’s Confrontasi cut off Singapore’s southern hinterland, further undermining the fledgling nation’s traditional role as an entrepot trading post for the region. •  In 1968, the British government announced a withdrawal of its troops from Singapore, which left thousands of workers without a job and as much as a fifth of the economy at risk of coming to a halt. Surviving as a nation and creating a better life for the people were thus the over-riding priorities. And economic growth was seen as the principal means to help achieve this. The government made two strategic decisions – both sharply at odds with the conventional economic wisdom of the time. •  The first was to shift away from import-substitution in favour of export-led industrialisation. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  •  The second was to attract global multinational corporations as vehicles to achieve industrial growth.
Tarisa Watanagase: Changes in Thailand’s economic dynamism after the 1997 crisis Speech by Dr Tarisa Watanagase, Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at the International Symposium “Ten Years After the Asian Currency Crisis: Future Challenges for the Asian Economies and Financial Markets”, hosted by the Center for Monetary Cooperation in Asia (CeMCoA), Bank of Japan, Tokyo, 22 January 2007. *  *  *  At the outset, I would like to thank Governor Fukui and the Center for Monetary Cooperation in Asia, Bank of Japan, for inviting me to speak at this special international symposium and for the excellent arrangements made. It gives me both a great honor and pleasure to meet with many people who are genuinely interested in our ASEAN economies. In this first session, I have been asked to speak on changes in Thailand’s economic dynamism after the 1997 crisis as well as the Bank of Thailand’s view on where the Thai economy is heading. Due to the time constraint, I will limit my talk to only three key points. The first is that the Thai economy is now back on a firm growth path and has become more resilient. For nearly five years after the 1997 crisis, the Thai economy went through a period of substantial adjustment. The tough adjustment was unavoidable because the crisis had inflicted a deep wound on the economy.

In other words, ECB actions that support market confidence are of benefit not only to countries in difficulty, but also to the euro area as a whole. Our measures ensure the proper transmission of monetary policy, which means neither excessively high interest rates nor excessively low interest rates. The measures enable the ECB to continue to maintain price stability for the benefit of all citizens of the euro area. The announcement on OMTs has already triggered positive effects. Sentiment in financial markets has improved significantly. Excessive government bond spreads have gone down, a number of banks in stressed countries have been able to regain access to markets and Target2 balances have broadly stabilised. The way forward Let me draw to a close. Actions by the ECB can build confidence in the euro area in the near term. But only actions by governments can secure confidence in the euro area over the longer term. In particular, governments need to work together to establish a stronger institutional structure for the euro area. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  This process began in June this year with what has been called the “Four Presidents’ Report”. That report – of which I am a co-author – identified four key pillars on which a stable and prosperous monetary union should be built. These pillars are financial union, fiscal union, economic union and political union. In the near term, the most important pillar is financial union.
This is particularly pertinent to the Distributed Ledger Technology 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  platform for trade finance that we are building with the industry. This is why we have earlier announced a collaborative initiative with Singapore in this area. And I am also very pleased to note that HM Treasury and the HKMA have just started a dialogue to explore further cooperation under this project. Green Finance If I am asked to predict what will be an emerging theme for the financial services sector in 2018, green finance looks like a safe bet. Green finance is growing rapidly and Mainland China has become one of the major markets for green bonds. Hong Kong is also keen on tapping into the green finance opportunities. The Hong Kong Government plans to issue a green bond for the first time next year. There is much we can learn from and collaborate with London, which has been a forerunner in this segment of the market. One of the burning issues is the divergence in various green bonds standards and assessments currently in the market. I hope today’s Seminar could shed some light on this and also the way forward for green finance development. Conclusion The future is not all rosy though. Challenges and uncertainties abound and this calls for stronger cross-border collaboration. The success of this Forum in the past six years shows that London and Hong Kong can be an all-weather friend. And I wish all of you a very fruitful discussion today. Thank you.

As housing prices have climbed, the number of homes moving into the foreclosure process and the number of households with mortgages underwater have fallen sharply. Moreover, households have deleveraged their balance sheets. Debt levels have declined and lower interest rates have cut financing costs. As a result, the financial obligation ratio, which measures the debt servicing cost of households, has declined from a peak of 18.1 percent of disposable income in the fourth quarter of 2007 to 15.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013. This is a level not seen since the early 1980s. On the fiscal side, the amount of restraint has diminished sharply. For 2014, the projected drag is about ½ percent of GDP, roughly half the level of 2013. Moreover, much of this restraint was frontloaded into the beginning of the year, with the cessation of long-term unemployment compensation, the expiration of the bonus depreciation provisions and the higher tax rates that applied to final tax settlements for the 2013 tax year. For the remainder of this year and next, the degree of fiscal restraint should be very modest. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  In terms of the outlook abroad, the circumstances are more mixed. Although Europe is doing better, Japan is digesting the large hike in consumption taxes that was implemented on April 1, Chinese growth is slowing and some other emerging market economies are coping with structural imbalances that are anticipated to lead to slower growth this year.
You could think of this as a new piece of critical national infrastructure – a publically-available digital platform for diffusing new processes and practices across the UK company sector, enhancing technological trickle-down to the furthest reaches of the long tail. (b) Supporting Technology Transfer  A second area where progress could be made in creating an improved diffusion infrastructure is by harnessing the UK’s university network. The UK’s top-ranked universities are already playing a crucial role  56  Baldwin (2016). 21  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  21  in establishing the UK as an international innovation hub. Their business parks serve as crucibles of creativity. They are an important reason why the UK ranks so highly on innovation and start-ups. The question, raised in a speech of mine last month, is whether the UK’s other universities could serve as spokes for these hubs, helping diffuse innovation more broadly across sectors and regions. In principle, using the university network in this way has advantages. Unlike the Catapults, these institutional spokes do not need to be created anew. And the universities already have extensive regional and sectoral reach. Clearly, this would require a fairly significant repurposing of universities. Any new activities would also need adequate financing. But neither of these problems seems insurmountable. And looking ahead, it seems likely universities will need to rethink their purpose and focus, in the light of profound shifts in the future of work and the skills demands of students.

The UK’s Productivity Problem: Hub No Spokes Speech given by  Andrew G Haldane Chief Economist Bank of England  Academy of Social Sciences Annual Lecture 28 June 2018  The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the Bank of England or the Monetary Policy Committee. I would like to thank Sandra Batten, Shiv Chowla, Gabor Pinter, Patrick Schneider, Brad Speigner and Pawel Smietanka for their help in preparing the text. I would like to thank Tera Allas, Ben Broadbent, Caroline Butler, Jeremy Franklin, Colm Manning, Richard Sherrington, Silvana Tenreyro, Ryland Thomas and Jan Vlieghe for their comments and contributions. This work contains statistical data from ONS which is Crown Copyright. The use of the ONS statistical data in this work does not imply the endorsement of the ONS in relation to the interpretation or analysis of the statistical data. This work uses research datasets which may not exactly reproduce National Statistics aggregates. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  Introduction I am delighted to be giving this year’s Annual Lecture of the Academy of Social Sciences and honoured to be a Fellow of the Academy. I thought I would use the occasion to discuss an issue of pressing public policy concern, an issue that affects the living standards of each and every one of us and has, as best we can tell, since the dawn of time: productivity. It is a terrible word, as it leaves most people dazed and confused.
Chart 10: Chinese credit growth Percentage change on a year ago  45 40 35 30  Non-bank  25  Headline TSF  20  Bank  15 10  Nominal GDP  5 0  2013  2014  2015  2016  2017  2018  Sources: CEIC, Datastream from Refinitiv, The People's Bank of China and Bank calculations. A downturn in the Chinese economy would test the resilience elsewhere. China’s contribution to global growth has risen from one-fifth to one-third since the last US tightening cycle. 22  22 Reflecting the increased importance for China to the global economy, the scenario used in the FPC’s annual stress tests of the major UK banks includes a significant slowdown in the Chinese economy. 14  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  14  To give a sense of the issue, in the 21 credit booms that matched the scale of China’s since 1975, annual growth dropped by 3¼ percentage points on average in the subsequent years. Adjusting for progress thus far and China’s degree of development, this suggests growth could slow a further 1 to 1½ percentage points. Of course, deeper trade tensions would worsen the slowdown. The Bank of England estimates that a 3% drop in Chinese GDP would knock one per cent off global activity, including half a per cent off each of UK, US and euro area GDP, through trade, commodities and financial market channels.

10 With this range of motivating factors and the impact they have on the culture in mind, a number of firms have integrated “how” factors into an employee’s performance evaluations by assessing the methods used to achieve a performance goal alongside the “what” components such as contributing to their group’s financial performance. Industry Benchmarking Another perspective is from the industry as a whole. I think we can gain important insights by looking across the financial industry, identifying best practices, and understanding what approaches are most effective in positively influencing conduct and culture. Conferences and workshops like those hosted regularly by the New York Fed and others can help. In addition, standardized metrics and indicators can provide insights when assessing changes over time and across firms. The BSB, for example, provides one lens on assessing culture change for a broad cross-section of financial services firms operating in the U.K.11 Each firm participating in the survey has the ability to see its outcomes relative to others and the industry average. This type of industry-wide assessment gives firms insight into areas they can individually focus on, as well as areas they may want to address as an industry. The U.K. is not alone in this approach.
Other countries have abandoned the attempt to maintain rigidly fixed exchange rates, and adopted a  BIS Review 71/2001  1  combination of domestic monetary management based on an inflation target and a floating exchange rate. Examples include both developed economies, such as the UK and Canada, and emerging market economies, such as Brazil and South Africa. There are arguments for and against both of these approaches. But what is clear is that both in theory and practice there is now a recognition that pegged (fixed but adjustable) exchange rates do not provide a viable long-term middle course. More interesting, perhaps, is the absence of serious debate on the merits of the third position, namely the willingness to forego freedom of capital movements in order to retain domestic monetary autonomy and stable exchange rates. That is perhaps surprising in the light of the experience of the two major countries in Asia that escaped the financial crisis of 1997-98, namely India and China, which had in common the presence of capital controls. The willingness to impose controls on capital movements, at least temporarily, was certainly evident at the Bretton Woods Conference. Mindful of the weakness of Britain's national balance sheet, Lord Keynes, urged on by the Bank of England, argued that there should be no legally binding obligation to make the sterling balances convertible into dollars.

One reaction to these extremely large packages – "bailouts" – and the accompanying moral hazard is simply to say that the official sector should have no part to play in what is essentially a private international capital market. Official lending is now small relative to private capital flows. Over the last three years, private flows have been around 7.5 times greater than official flows, according to IIF data. Against that backdrop, some have argued that the IMF should be abolished. This would be to throw out the baby with the bath water. What is needed is a "middle way" between full IMF insurance and no insurance at all. This middle way would comprise IMF lending but within strong presumptive limits. A key principle underlying this approach is that the international community needs to set out as clearly as possible the criteria that will govern the size and scope of IMF lending. Since most agree that there are limits on IMF lending, there is merit in explaining those limits to both potential borrowing countries and their private creditors. This would enable debtor countries better to plan their policies. It would also allow creditors to assess risk more accurately. Indeed, put more controversially, how can sovereign risk be accurately assessed without clarity about the Fund's role? A lack of clarity about the likely response of the international community to potential crises is a recipe for inaccurate assessments of risk. Such uncertainty would add to the (already high) cost of borrowing by emerging markets.
Together, we can raise standards, professionalism and accountability of market participants within the FX market in Singapore and globally. On that note, I hope that you will have good discussions and a fruitful conference ahead. 1 Source: BIS Triennial FX Surveys. 2 By signing the Code, a market participant represents that it (a) supports the Code and recognises it as a set of  principles of good practice for the FX market; (b) is committed to conducting its FX market activities in a manner that is consistent with the principles of the Code; and (c) considers that it has taken appropriate steps, based on the size and complexity of its activities, and the nature of its engagement in the FX market, to align its activities with the principles of the Code. 3 The assessment would take into account issues such as the breadth of adoption of the Code, the effectiveness  of adherence mechanisms, the extent to which behaviour in the market has changed and the effect of the Code on market functioning. 4 BIS press release, 25 May 2017, “Central bank Governors welcome global code of conduct for currency  markets” 5 Source: 2016 BIS Triennial FX Survey. 6/6  BIS central bankers' speeches

Looking forward, roles of Asian banks as intermediary could be diminished on the back of the growing capital markets and shadow banking, which includes not only traditional ones like asset management companies and savings cooperatives, but also more modern ones like crowd-funding and peer-to-peer lending. Capital account liberalization will also lead to asset diversification abroad. Banks’ funding sources are likely prone to be more vulnerable and volatile, with the increasing interconnectedness between banks, non-banks and capital markets. After many years of consolidating our financial systems after the Asian financial crisis, technology could fragment our financial systems in an unprecedented way. Regulatory arbitrage could lead to pockets of vulnerability, particularly in the less-regulated or unregulated areas of shadow banking. Ladies and gentlemen, the need for rapid transformation in Asia is not limited to only banks and financial institutions. Changing technology, changing demographic structure, and changing global operating environment also necessitate that Asian businesses transform themselves to be able to compete in the new environment, where productivity is key. In addition, they need to improve their risk management and immunity to be able to cope with increasing volatility and uncertainties of the modern world. It is also crucial that Asian banks and businesses understand developments in the society at large that could affect their operating environment, chief among these is income inequality.
It is thus no exaggeration to say that small IMF Update of World Economic Outlook, January 2010.businesses form the backbone of European economies, including Malta’s. A better understanding by policymakers of this sector and of the constraints it faces, which are often different from those encountered by larger firms, is therefore crucial for the purpose of further expanding the economy’s growth potential. In the current environment characterised by a reduced availability of credit and tighter lending standards, the financing needs of small businesses deserve particular attention. In this regard it is important to recall that SMEs in general, and micro enterprises in particular, are more dependent on the banking sector than larger firms, which have the expertise and the resources to tap the capital market. This is very much the case in the euro area: between 2004 and 2008, banks accounted for roughly 70% of the total external financing requirements compared to just 20% in the US. This critical role of bank credit partly explains the unprecedented liquidity-providing operations undertaken by the European Central Bank since August 2007 designed to sustain the flow of credit to the real economy during the crisis, and the repeated calls by the Governing Council for banks to reinforce their balance sheets so as to be better able to fulfil their responsibility in this regard. The economic environment in the near term The world economy is finally emerging from the most severe recession in recent history. Global output declined by 0.8% in 2009, while trade volumes shrank by more than 12%.

Michael C Bonello: Financing the small business sector – constraints and opportunities Speech by Mr Michael C Bonello, Governor of the Central Bank of Malta, at the European Federation of Ethical and Alternative Banks and Financiers Seminar, St.Julian's, 15 April 2010. *  *  *  The holding of a seminar on credit for small businesses is both appropriate and timely given the important role played by these enterprises in modern, free-market economies and the contribution they are likely to make in the recovery phase as economies emerge from recession. It is perhaps not widely known that of the almost 20 million enterprises active within the European Union (EU) in 2005, 99.8% were small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), defined as businesses that employ fewer than 250 persons. 1 In turn, more than nine-tenths of these were micro enterprises, with a workforce of fewer than 10. In 2005 SMEs accounted for 58% of the value added generated in the EU and 67% of all employment, compared to 55% in the US. 2 Small businesses are a major source of dynamism in the Maltese economy too. SMEs constitute the overwhelming majority of businesses, accounting for over 99% of the total and two-thirds of total employment. The vast majority are micro enterprises. These small operations act as customers of, and suppliers to, larger companies and are an essential source of entrepreneurship and innovation.