Data from Credit Counselling Singapore (CCS) also shows that the people who over-spend and over-borrow are not just low-income people. In fact, most of them are not low-income. The average income of those who come to CCS with serious debt problems is around $ per month, not far below the median income level; and quite a few are higher income. Hence everyone can over-borrow because of overspending. According to the CCS, the most common problem is actually over-spending. 5. MAS has also found from the survey that more than half of those surveyed had insufficient insurance to protect their dependents if something were to happen to them. One in three of those surveyed did not know that they were covered by Medishield. Hence the level of awareness is not very high. 6. Quite a few people are passive towards managing their money. That means not planning ahead or finding out information that would help them to manage their money well. This is again something we find all over the world. In most countries, they find that many people do not plan ahead, and they take life one step at a time, taking things as they come. But eventually, they may end up with problems if they have not saved enough or not anticipated some future expenses for their children or themselves. So we can do more to help Singaporeans to plan ahead, by expanding financial education for all age and income groups, all over Singapore.
ONS, KLEMS and authors' calculations, see Appendix A.1 to Bailey et al. (2022) for more details. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a consensus yet on what exactly lies behind this observed relationship. A growing literature shows that there are barriers to intangible investment, for example because intangible assets cannot be easily used as collateral. [24] Thus, the tightening of financial conditions following the global financial crisis could have disproportionally hindered the development of intangible-intensive industries, with potentially long-term consequences for productivity growth. [25] However, intangible investment has recovered in recent years, while productivity growth has remained weak. Could it be, perhaps, that the barriers to intangible investment benefit investment by low-productivity firms? Or are other factors at play? Other recent studies have highlighted the impact of the intangible economy on competition. Intangible technologies tend to require large upfront investments, what economists call fixed costs. This may give firms with high-intangible adoption a competitive advantage and make it difficult for new innovative firms to enter the market. In that case, entrenched incumbent firms may have fewer  Page 15  incentives to innovate, potentially slowing innovation adoption in the long run. [26] However, the UK data do not seem to provide strong evidence in favour of this second mechanism, compared with research studying the United States. While the US literature reports a decline in business dynamism and an increase in market power alongside the rise of intangibles, business dynamism seems to have been less affected in the United Kingdom.