If you're a civil servant, Malaysia was the place to be last week rather than Singapore.
A day after Malaysia gave its bureaucrats a bonus of half a month's wages as part of a package to boost its economy, next-door Singapore on Thursday cut the pay of ministers and top civil servants by 10 per cent and froze the rest.
Both economies are struggling to cushion the demand shock delivered by the deadly Sars virus.
But while Malaysia took its cue from Hong Kong and Taiwan and included a healthy dose of fiscal stimulus in its package, Singapore's cautious response reflected a growing conviction that demand management has only a limited role to play in a small open economy buffeted by fast-changing business cycles.
"They only use fiscal policy as a counter-cyclical when they see the whites of the eyes of recession. The approach is always to use wage restraint as the first line of defence," said PK Basu of Robust Economic Analysis Ltd, a Singapore consultancy. The clampdown on civil service pay followed a recommendation by the city state's National Wages Council of wage cuts for firms hit by Sars and a pay freeze for most other companies grappling with the uncertain economic environment.
"Unit labour costs are still falling, so to call for additional wage restraint in a deflationary environment is tough medicine - inappropriately tough medicine," Mr Basu said.
With Sars decimating Singapore's tourism industry, Tony Nafte of CLSA Emerging Markets in Singapore said it made good sense to keep corporate costs to a minimum pending an upturn.
But he said the economy needed a boost to consumption to compensate for the wage freeze. "Because they're not doing that, I would give this a thumb's down overall," Mr Nafte said.
Mr Nafte said he favoured bringing forward scheduled cuts in Singapore's corporate and personal taxes as well as temporarily scrapping the island's four per cent sales tax. Malaysia put more money in people's pockets by cutting employee contributions to the state welfare fund.
The wage freeze was the second leg of Singapore's response to Sars. Last month the city state unveiled measures worth just 0.1 per cent of gross domestic product - even though it runs a budget deficit of under one per cent of GDP and has large reserves.
Malaysia's package, which had been in the pipeline before the Sars outbreak, totalled two per cent of GDP. Hong Kong's was worth one per cent of GDP and Taiwan's came to 0.5 per cent of GDP.
"I'm just not that encouraged by the government's fiscal stance. They're being just too overly conservative," Mr Nafte said. "If there's any country in the region that has the money to spend, it's Singapore. So I don't see that as a problem."
The problem, as Singapore sees it, is that pump-priming doesn't provide much bang for the buck. Two packages to help the economy recover from a recession in 2001, the steepest downturn since the country's independence in 1965, cost seven per cent of GDP but boosted 2002 output by only one percentage point.
This was largely because Singapore is a very open economy so any direct government expenditure leaks away into imports.
Indirect measures to shore up profits and balance sheets - such as last week's wage freeze - provide a bigger boost to GDP in the medium term than active counter-cyclical policies, according to the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
Given the growing volatility of the business cycle - before Sars, Singapore was hit by the 2001 high-tech slump and the 1997 Asian financial crisis - Sanjeev Sanyal of Deutsche Bank said the government was right to shy away from short-term activism and to keep its eye on longer-term economic restructuring.
The risk in such a fast-changing economy is that, by the time stimulus measures kick in, demand is already recovering, resulting in an inappropriate pro-cyclical policy, Sanyal said.
"The way I look at it, it is entirely pointless to try to do demand management," he said. "The only thing to do is to maintain a broadly neutral stance."