Research And Decision Making For Capital And Physical Resources

Critical Analysis – Competitiveness and innovation landscapes in the tropics: a comparison of Singapore and New Zealand during 1999-2008

Describe about the Research and Decision Making for Capital and Physical Resources.

The article provides an overview about how human capital and physical resources are prearranged as well as organized in a concentrated and productive manner in order to generate equal and dispersed economic advantages. In this case, competitiveness should not be confused with competition that is concerned with how a company or country can outflank its competitors based on price and quantity. On the other hand, competitiveness is also determined to a large extent by the ability of a country to innovate and expand areas of competencies. Singapore and New Zealand are among the most competitive countries in the tropics, described by countries lying in the belt of the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.

Singapore is a small nation-state that became independent in the year 1965 and has continued to enjoy a sustained period of investment both in infrastructure as well as in well education. The major source of the new technology in the domestic firms of Singapore is FDI. The country has grown in tandem with industrialization as well as shipping activities in the year 1980. However, the country had improved a lot from the recession that took place in the year 2001 to expand rapidly through to 2007. The slowdown that took place in the year 2008-2009 did not affect Singapore despite leading to global financial crisis. The highly developed and successful free market economy led to the GDP growth in Singapore by 7.6 percent. This indicated a very strong performance, despite huge quarterly fluctuation between the year 2008 and 2010. As a result, Singapore also enjoys a high per capita GDP as compared to other developed countries. The high per capita GDP is also mostly due to the fact that the country heavily depends on exports, particularly on information technology goods and pharmaceuticals (Kuah, 2014).

On the other hand, during the year 1950 New Zealand was among the countries that had the highest GDP per capita. As a result, in the year 1973 the country became the part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. However, in the year 1987, the average quarterly GDP growth of the country was only 0.57 percent. Based on purchasing power parity the GDP per capita averaged US$ 23,333 between 1998 and 2009. The major reason that led to the fall in GDP in New Zealand was the small formal emphasis on FDI as well as sluggish productivity. However, the country embarked on key economic reforms that included privatization as well as opening up of markets. Since then, the nation has renovated its public sector, rationalized its research institutes, promoted public-private new knowledge-exchange relationships, and slackened its markets. This was also possible with the help of the government of New Zealand who transformed the economy from an agrarian economy to that of a more innovation-oriented market economy that could compete internationally (Yue, 2015).

Concentrating on modernism in particular

The competitive analysis on the Global Competitiveness Index is mostly based on the World Economic Forum. Global Competitiveness Index is a comprehensive index that captures both microeconomic and macroeconomic foundation of national competitiveness. According to this index, Singapore had constantly ranked in the top 3 countries. It was only in the year 2010 that Singapore entered the top 10 ranking for innovation due to its stellar performance. The major reason was that despite a decent performance in trade sophistication, a weakness also stays. The weak performance of New Zealand was observed mostly because of its innovation as well as trade complexity and the gap in performance comparative to the other two groups had broadened over time. The key reason for this is the problems related to local supplier quantity with cluster development gaps (Elias, 2013).

Concentrating on modernism in particular, New Zealand displays poor performance in innovation and trade sophistication comparative to their basic necessity and competence enhancers. However, on the other hand Singapore had performed comparatively better on innovation as compared to trade sophistication. This was mostly because; government was successful in the creation of superior circumstances in its business environment. Despite the fact that scientific and research institution ranked high in New Zealand, the limited availability of scientists and engineers slowed down innovation. According to reports, the government of New Zealand did not supposedly acted as an adequately complicated and challenging purchaser of advanced technological commodities. In order to address these gaps, some primary adjustments to trade competition are required. This will in turn support a move towards more niche type approaches where commodities and services are the entity of firms (Shangqin, McCann & Oxley, 2013).

One of the core determinants of competitiveness is innovative capacity as it is likely to have restricted capacity to create raised output from further investments in capital. The upholding of competitiveness under powerful global competition had always remained a central challenge for both Singapore and New Zealand. The position of government can be imperative to the expansion of national competitiveness. However, the cluster policy aspects stay controversial. In this case, the government requires to adopt a laissez-faire strategy and accept the free market view of the economy with a crave to protect as well as reinstate free market administration in areas that are not self-governing. Another most important determinant that leads to innovation is research and development. It has been identified that policies with a short-term advantage as well as those that hold back competition as well as innovation may damage firms in the long-run. As a result, those countries will no longer be able to protect their firms through business protection as well as subsidies as in the past. Hence, they require to seek to uphold competitiveness through a wide range of economic, internationalization and innovative measures that will enhance human capital, output, innovation and knowledge. It can be analyzed that both Singapore and New Zealand should maintain competitiveness (Fraj, Matute & Melero, 2015).

Determinants of competitiveness

The Ministry of Trade and Industry is accountable for promoting monetary growth as well as creation of job in Singapore. The major agencies within the Ministry of Trade and Industry comprises the Economic Development Board, International Enterprise Singapore as well as a newly recognized agency known as Science, Technology and Research. The Economic Development Board acts as a central medium for FDI and supposedly enjoys direct contact to all government ministries. With the help of EDB, Singapore gets the support from FDI, as it will be able to maintain close contact with trade requirements. On the other hand, International Enterprise Singapore encourages as well as provides support to large potential local firms for outward investment (Chang, 2014).

It is claimed by the MTI officials, that the national expenditure in a R&D structure is made possible after 15 years. However, a R&D framework should be made available within a less possible time to make the R&D development more advanced in Singapore. Several schemes will reduce R&D costs by co-sharing costly facilities as well as accelerating the development timeline. Levies are ring-fenced by the Singapore Government for expenditure in infrastructure and R&D. As per the reports, R&D expenditures had always remained high in Singapore. It is imperative to reduce the cost that will help the economy of Singapore to conserve cash. In that case, the companies require to become a customer or supplier of former internal projects. It is also important to reduce R&D expenditures during a downturn. Singapore also has a huge number of R&D employees that includes industry, higher education and government (Montoya et al., 2014).

During the year 2006, the percentage of GERD measured against GDP is 2.2 percent. Singapore produced more than 42,832 scientific publication between the year 1999 and 2008 in total. The enormous incremental expenditure in R&D resulted in 9,732 pamphlets per million population. As per the data, it can be analyzed that Singapore is concentrated in two academic organization in terms of scientific research. More than 56 percent of the companies in Singapore had undertaken research. The major global partner in scientific research for Singapore is the USA that presents about 12 percent of the total publication for the period 1999-2008. There has been a remarkable increase in collaboration score between China and Singapore as the geographic immediacy of Singapore to China is imitated in scientific alliance as well (Ayrikyan & Zaman, 2012).

On the other hand, the present reforms in R&D landscape in New Zealand includes having former public research institutes that is compound and privatized into eight Crown Research Institutes. In the case of New Zealand, the department that is responsible for Science and Technology is the Ministry of Research. On the other hand, the ministry of education advices on the policies related to universities. The Ministry of Research provides policy advice on issues related to RS&T. It also collaborates with other governmental groups where RS&T intersects with their work. As a result, the Ministry of Research is helpful for the economy and it should be followed (McGrath, 2015).

A good share of scientific research by firms in New Zealand has been observed, where the firms co-authored for more than a quarter. As per the reports, there are more than Crown-owned companies and investigate institutes among the top-20 corporate publishers in New Zealand. This is analyzed to be helpful as the ministers of the Crown acts as the shareholding ministries in the companies (Kelsey, 2015).

Conclusion

It can be concluded that the suggestion made by field observation in the case of New Zealand transforms the previous public research institutes into privatized profitable operation. On the other hand, Singapore demonstrated a model of powerful government agencies that collaborates with public universities as well as research laboratories. It can also be concluded that being an earlier developed country, New Zealand has a wealthy as well as history of innovation.

References

Ayrikyan, A., & Zaman, M. H. (2012). Creating an Innovation Ecosystem: Governance and the Growth of Knowledge Economies. Boston University. Pardee Center Research Report.

Chang, Y. (2014). Energy commodity trading in Singapore. Energy Market Integration in East Asia: Energy Trade, Cross border Electricity, and Price Mechanism.

Elias, J. (2013). Davos woman to the rescue of global capitalism: Postfeminist politics and competitiveness promotion at the World Economic Forum. International Political Sociology, 7(2), 152-169.

Fraj, E., Matute, J., & Melero, I. (2015). Environmental strategies and organizational competitiveness in the hotel industry: The role of learning and innovation as determinants of environmental success. Tourism Management, 46, 30-42.

Kelsey, J. (2015). The New Zealand experiment: A world model for structural adjustment?. Bridget Williams Books.

Kuah, A. T. (2014). Competitiveness and innovation landscapes in the tropics: a comparison of Singapore and New Zealand during 1999–2008. International Journal of Economic Policy in Emerging Economies, 7(3), 245-263.

McGrath, K. M. (2015). Sustainable growth of New Zealand’s economy from New Zealand’s science sector. Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 45(2), 114-117.

Montoya, J. C., Rebulanan, C. L., Parungao, N. A. C., & Ramirez, B. (2014). A look at the ASEAN-NDI: building a regional health R&D innovation network. Infectious diseases of poverty, 3(1), 1.

Shangqin, H., McCann, P., & Oxley, L. (2013). 19 Innovation in New Zealand: issues of firm size, local market size and economic geography. Handbook of Industry Studies and Economic Geography, 459.

Yue, C. S. (2015). Globalization and Regionalization: Singapore’s Trade and FDI. ‘Singapore”s Economic Development’: Retrospection and Reflections, 169.