Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University

RCAPS Report “From Lion City to Silicon Island: The Impacts of Trade Facilitation on Singapore’s Electronic Integrated Circuits Industry”

On Dec 9, RCAPS welcomed Professor LIU Yujie and Professor KIM Sangho from APU to deliver a RCAPS Current entitled “From Lion City to Silicon Island: The Impacts of Trade Facilitation on Singapore’s Electronic Integrated Circuits Industry”

Professor KIM Sangho

Professor LIU Yujie

[Report by Professor KIM Sangho (APM) as the seminar organizer]

In the seminar, Prof. Liu delivered how Singapore have developed the electronic integrated circuits (EIC) industry. He talked that the Singaporean government have used trade promotion policy in the EIC policy along with trade restraining policy in supporting industries including finance, logistics and telecommunications. To investigate the impact of trade facilitation policy on the ICT industry, he used a gravity model that includes free trade agreement and trade block as explanatory variables for the volume of Singaporean bilateral trade in the EIC industry. He showed that trade facilitation policy has a significant positive impact on Singaporean EIC exports. He also discussed many related policy issues that had influence on the development of the industry.

After 50 minutes presentation, a Q&A session was started from Prof. Yamagata who provided insightful comments about the Singaporean economy. Followed were many questions and comments from the floors. There were about ten questions and comments from graduate students including Ph.D. student, one undergraduate student and two participants from China. The Q&A session lasted about 50 minutes.

Active and intense floor participation reflects the success of the seminar in stimulating academic exchanges. Our students learned a lot from both the seminar presentation and ensuing Q&A session. The seminar provided them an example how empirical research can be implemented to industry analysis. This will help them with their ongoing research.

After the seminar ended, some academic exchanges on pursuing possible co-work were made. Some research on the Chinese economy with Prof. Liu will be attempted by continuing academic exchanges in the future.

The more of these opportunities to our graduate students should be provided.

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