Review of Economic Growth of Singapore in the Twentieth Century: Historical GDP Estimates and Empirical Investigations

摘要

"The commercial growth of Singapore", so remarked the historian Wong Lin Ken, "is written in its statistics." Yet the economic historiography of this great entrepot of colonial Southeast Asia has been stymied by the absence of data on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or proxies thereof, that reaches back into the nineteen or early twentieth centuries. That is, until the author of the current work undertook to fill the void. Based on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Malaya, this book documents and details his painstaking efforts to reconstruct nominal and real time series of the historical GDP of Singapore for the periods 1900-1939 and 1950-1960, whereafter official figures became available.