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ABSTRACTDespite its excellent public healthcare system and efficient public administration, Singapore has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. While fatalities in the city-state remain low and contact tracing efforts have been largely successful, it has nonetheless experienced high rates of infection and the emergence of large infection clusters in its foreign worker dormitories. This paper analyses this dual-track policy outcome – low fatalities but high infection rates – from a policy capacity perspective. Specifically, the policy capacities that had contributed to Singapore's low fatality rates and effective contact tracing are identified while the capacity deficiencies that may have caused its high rates of infection are discussed. In doing so, I argue that the presence of fiscal, operational and political capacities that were built up after the SARS crisis had contributed to Singapore's low fatality rate and contact tracing capabilities while deficiencies in analytical capacities may explain its high infection rate.

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 has revealed weaknesses in financial regulatory policies and institutions in many countries. These weaknesses extend to the regional and international domains of financial policy as well. This article calls for the need for better designed financial regulations and policies by taking a policy design perspective. It provides a multi-level approach to understanding financial reform as design that examines the various components of policy design — policy means, goals and change — at the three levels of policymaking — international regional, national. In doing so, we aim to provide a first step towards a more design-centric approach to financial sector reform.

ABSTRACT
The first decade of the 21st century recognised the growing salience of transnational or global governance as an analytical field of inquiry and as a normative project. In this introductory article, we argue that IPE offers a wider and deeper contextual understanding of the 'global' in a way that the scholarship of international relations, on the one hand, and that of international economics, on the other, have not done. IPE has been less strong in the context of global policy analysis that faut de mieux and, rather strangely, has been left largely to the economics discipline as other disciplines have slowly ceded the policy playing field to economics – at times with disastrous outcomes for policy. In light of these strengths and weaknesses of IPE as a framework for policy analysis, greater efforts at triangulating the insights of IPE and global public policy may help provide richer and more nuanced analyses of policy and politics.

AbstractThis paper conceptualizes political competences at the system level of capabilities to function as "legitimation capacity" in a policy context. It identifies trust in the political, social, economic, and security spheres as the key element driving this capacity. Trust ensures that state actions and institutions are perceived as legitimate and receive public support, which in turn allows political skills to be exercised, preventing political or institutional decay and policy ineffectiveness. Conceptualization of legitimation capacity as comprising trust across political, social, economic, and security dimensions offers a useful framework for analyzing and estimating a government's capacity in different policy spheres. It provides a practical tool for estimating any deficiencies in legitimation capacity that a government may face. While governments may be endowed with different levels of legitimate capacity when they first attain office, they may over time work on building up capacity by focusing on the spheres in which they may be lacking. Conversely, they may lose legitimacy if their efforts in these areas are counter-productive.

Policy design, or the deliberate governmental effort to attain desired policy objectives, is an integral part of micro and macro-level fiscal and financial regulation. This paper seeks to address the role of regime coherence and policy capacity in contributing to effective financial policy design. Drawing on the cases of the Global Financial Crisis and Asian Financial Crisis and focusing on Asian states, we assess regime capacity at both international and domestic levels. We argue that it is the integration of analytical, operational and political capacities that have contributed to the overall ability of a government regime to address and respond to crises.