Borrower hardship, while a critical issue, is not often addressed by consumer protection frameworks across the Asia–Pacific. The widespread use of payment holidays during the COVID-19 crisis provides a significant case study on the importance of having borrower hardship provisions as a consumer protection tool. This paper compares the pre-pandemic availability of payment holidays in three Asia–Pacific jurisdictions: Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. It evaluates their existing legislative frameworks, as well as regulatory and industry guidelines on borrower hardship, and contrasts this with their use of payment holidays during the pandemic. Where there were existing industry guidelines on borrower hardship, lenders were able to spearhead an industry-wide approach towards payment relief without regulatory intervention by governments. Beyond the pandemic, the paper argues that self-regulation has potential for protecting borrower interests by standardising the scope of, and the procedure for, obtaining hardship relief. It argues that there is a need for a greater prevalence of industry codes of conducts governing lenders’ approach towards borrower hardship across the Asia–Pacific. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

This chapter analyses the participation of Singapore in the global value chains (GVC): how much of its gross exports are GVC-related trade how downstream it is; and which countries are its key upstream and downstream trade partners. The analysis is carried out both at the country aggregate level and at the sector level. New formulas are proposed in the gross export decomposition framework of Koopman, Wang and Wei (2014) and Borin and Mancini (2017), to characterise a country/industry’s downstreamness in the GVC and the importance of each trade partner in its backward/forward linkages. Singapore started off with a very high level of GVC trade in 1995, but its unique status has been diluted over the years. In the last two decades, East Asian countries (such as Taiwan and Korea) have become equally, if not more, active players in the GVCs. In contrast with Japan and the United States, Singapore is located at the lower end of the GVC (with a similar downstreamness index as China). Malaysia and the United States were Singapore’s top two upstream/downstream partners in 1995; however, by 2011, China had taken up substantially more weight and replaced the US’s status.

Investor-bank litigation in Singapore has largely been confined to traditional common law claims in contract and tort, where investors have had limited success, usually because of contractual clauses that favour banks over clients. However, changes to the regulatory framework after the global financial crisis of 2007-9 have enhanced the protection of retail investors in different ways: measures emphasising the best interests of investors have been put in place; rights to obtain damages for breach of statutory duty under the Financial Advisers Act have been expanded - although they have hardly been examined by the courts; and consumer investors can now sue financial institutions for unfair practices under the Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act, which had previously excluded financial products and services. This chapter examines the protection given to investors by statute as well as their predicament under the common law, and explores the challenges which investors face in suing their banks.

The Republic of Singapore is a city state, located on one main island surrounded by many small islets with a total land area that has grown from 581.5 sq. km. in the 1960s to 719.1 sq. km. in 2015. Singapore has a small albeit developed economy. With a 2017 GDP of 447.3 billion dollars (Ministry of Trade and Industry 2018), Singapore’s population of 5.6 million has one of the highest Gross National Income per capita in the world. Singapore does not have any traditional energy resources domestically, and its energy sector almost entirely relies on natural gas imports. Traditionally, most of Singapore’s supply of natural gas has come from pipelines that connect from Indonesia and Malaysia. However, in a bid to diversify and improve the security of fuel supply, Singapore has moved toward Liquefied Natural Gas, with an LNG terminal opening in 2013.

State-owned enterprises and sovereign wealth funds have 'insured' Singapore's domestic economy against financial crisis and restructuring interventions from multilateral institutions, engendered elite cohesion and political stability, binding middle class employees to the political system. This essay analyses paths by which the Singapore government established state-owned enterprises and transformed them into global enterprises. It also examines how sovereign wealth funds contribute to government social expenditure without increasing taxes. Such redistribution through state capitalism resonates with the People's Action Partys social democratic origins, inviting comparisons with contemporary developments in Chinese state-capitalism.