On the Myth and Mystery of Singapore’s ‘Zero TFP’
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper questions recent analyses about the sources of growth and the role of technical progress in Singapore.Using econometric estimation of aggregate production functions or growth accounting, these analyses have concluded that technological progress, or total factor productivity (TFP) growth, has played no role (if not a negative one) in the growth episode of the city-state.I show that these analyses cannot establish conclusively that Singapore grew without productivity.First, the notion of aggregate production function is questioned on theoretical grounds.Second, it is shown that aggregate production functions and income accounting identity (i.e., value added equals the wage bill plus profits) are isomorphic representations to one another, and that the latter can be rewritten via an algebraic transformation as a form that looks like a production function.This isomorphism prevents the proper testing of the production function, and the unambiguous connection of TFP growth with technical progress.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it