Conclusion
SINGAPORE’S POLICY LABORATORY AND THE GLOBAL FUTURE
We take the future for granted only at our peril.
As a city that is also a nation, in a world where the challenges of governance are growing ever more complex, Singapore is at once an anomalous outlier and a potentially evocative paradigm. It is atypical, yet also a model whose highly distinctive policies could help resolve some of humankind’s most acute and vexing social security challenges. Small though it is, Singapore appears destined to serve as a policy-design laboratory for some of the largest nations and the most gargantuan problems on earth.
Singapore bears particularly close examination because its sustainable state and urban policy model, leveraged by the Digital Revolution and the Internet of Things, provides such a fresh and apt perspective on governance in today’s world. It shows how to tackle challenges of transnational importance in a world where markets are almost completely globalized, but governance is not. As Singapore is an economically advanced and technically sophisticated city-state, in the heart of the developing world, its example is not only timely but also broadly relevant. It provides insights for dealing with both G-7 welfare-state crises and also the epic rural-to-urban transition under way in the developing world, in an era of historic technological change.
In reviewing the intellectual journey of the preceding chapters, it is important to recall the key research questions with which it began. The general concern has been why Singapore, across the half century of its independence, has proved so successful. More specifically, how—despite vulnerabilities and constraints—has this diminutive city-state managed to remain competitive in a rapidly changing global economy, while providing sustainable social protection and also building a livable urban environment? The answers to these puzzling questions lie in the nature of Singaporean governance—particularly in the island’s distinctive institutions and policies.
In simple terms, Singapore has been successful because it has been smart in a dual sense: it has been pragmatic and also technologically empowered in the same way that a smart grid or a smart bomb is thought to be. Singapore policymaking has become smart—at the level of state, city, and global hub—because it has learned to perceive and respond effectively to both domestic and foreign challenges. Its state is smart because it is both minimalist and enabling; it is smart as a city also, owing to its integrated and holistic approach to urban problems, summoning innovative technology together with the wisdom and efficiency of its leaders to address them.
Some would also characterize the Singaporean smart state as amoral, or even immoral, especially in its treatment of guest workers and dissenters. The guest workers, in particular, form a major segment of Singaporean society—more than a third of the labor force—yet have lowly pay with few rights and privileges. The dissenters are much fewer but are inhibited in ways that are said to blunt their vital function of aiding social self-correction.
Singaporean smart-state architects would reply that they have had little choice in their mode of public configuration. Historically, their nation was born in a tough time in a tough neighborhood—amid the Vietnam War, enduring ethnic disorder, Britain’s withdrawal from east of Suez, and two oil shocks in its first few years of statehood. Geo-economically, theirs is a nation devoid of both resources and manpower, in a region with a surplus of both. Only by selectively importing and employing under tight controls, in strategic yet transitory fashion, can they maintain autonomy while enhancing productivity. Singapore, the city-state’s architects argue, has had no choice.
To answer the central research questions of how and why this distinctive sort of political economy has emerged and prospered in its volatile, competitive corner of the world, this book has explored subquestions that ultimately became chapters in their own right. Chapter 2 considered what prompted Singapore to strive so persistently to become smart, in the sense of being pragmatically responsive, and to retain that orientation even when other nations, such as Japan and many European states, began to lose their sensitivity to external challenge. Chapter 3 explored chronologically how smart capabilities emerged in Singapore and were strengthened, in both their human and technological dimensions, while leadership supported that capacity enhancement. Chapters 4 and 5 considered the operation of smart capabilities at the state and city level, respectively, in Singapore, while chapter 6 showed how Singapore has capitalized on globalization by nurturing transnational smart hubs on its own soil. These pages have shown, in short, how smart institutions emerged in Singapore, how they function, and what the implications are for the city-state’s broader relations with the world.
Concrete Discoveries
Much about Singapore’s governance applies concretely and practically to the broader world, especially to the 40 percent of humanity within 3,000 miles of its narrow confines that still has large segments struggling to emerge from poverty. Singapore has designed and implemented global best practices in a broad range of areas: traffic management, energy efficiency, water policy, public housing, microcredit, and ethnic relations, just to name a few. These innovative practices, many leveraged by information and communications technology, make substantial contributions in addressing some of the world’s most pressing human-security challenges—global warming, energy overconsumption, and racial conflict among them. And Singapore’s innovations make those contributions at a variety of levels, in transforming personal and municipal incentives while motivating entire nations to innovate as well.
One of the most important findings here must doubtless be the concrete details of smart institutional design in Singapore at both the national and local levels, which amount to global best practice across a vast range of components. Following are just a few specific examples that public policy schools and governments worldwide, especially in the developing world, could study with profit:
—The Housing and Development Board, which provides quality, low-cost housing for over 80 percent of Singapore’s population, at minimal direct cost to government.
—The Central Provident Fund, which ensures that citizens have post-retirement savings, while also mobilizing capital for national investment.
—The Economic Development Board, which effectively attracts foreign investment, integrating the related efforts of other agencies while monitoring markets in search of new strategic opportunities for local Singaporean business.
—The Temasek Holdings National Investment Company, which enhances national wealth and economic stability through global operations, supporting local firms while simultaneously minimizing moral hazard through its market-oriented approach to core holdings.
At a broader level, some distinctive general characteristics of “smart” Singapore public policy have international relevance:
Holistic approaches to policy. For reasons dating back to camaraderie among the Old Guard of the nation’s founders, and including innovative personnel policies, Singapore policymakers routinely consider the interactive effects of various policies and think of national policy in a more unified fashion than is common in most nations. This way of thinking, combined with a congenial, open institutional structure, gives Singapore unparalleled capacity to deal with the Digital Revolution and the emerging Internet of Things.
Inclusive, community-building ethnic policies. Harboring an unusually diverse population in a region with a history of ethnic strife, Singapore has forged, to a remarkable degree, a sense of common identity. It has also mobilized its diverse citizenry as a bridge to their powerful ancestral homelands, although the surge of guest workers and wealthy expatriates into Singapore over the past two decades is complicating that equation.
Shrewd small-state diplomacy. Singapore has ensured its national security in a turbulent region dominated traditionally by larger powers through pragmatic “leapfrog diplomacy”; aggressive “poisoned-shrimp” military deployments; virtual alliances that maintain credibility without permanent basing, while allowing flexible, multidimensional ties with outsiders; and active informal lobbying in key capitals around the world.
Responsive yet minimalist government. Singapore offers broad public health coverage, high-quality public housing, and insurance against catastrophic risk at significantly low cost to the general public, although the definition of “public” itself often omits a large guest-worker segment of the population.
Smart-city development. The government employs information and communications technology creatively, with increasing attention to the Internet of Things, creating efficient cybernetic mechanisms for minimizing the use of scarce resources, such as water and energy, while maximizing information flows.
Equally notable are Singapore’s specific policies that are formidably effective in achieving their declared objectives:
Water policy. Although a tiny, crowded city-state of little more than 700 square kilometers, with less than 6 million inhabitants, Singapore is nearly self-sufficient in its water supply, owing to a distinctive, successful “Four Taps” policy emphasizing catchment, import efficiency, desalination, and recycling.
Housing and land-use policy. Singapore efficiently provides its citizens and permanent residents with quality, low-cost housing that enables them to build a financial nest egg, assuring them of a stake in society that in turn facilitates social stability.
Transport policy. The government ensures smooth, relatively rapid transit across a crowded island at minimal environmental cost through market-oriented pricing policies, leveraged by the latest interactive ICT technology.
Food supply. Although predominantly urban, Singapore manages to be largely self-sufficient in vegetables and fruits through urban farming while keeping overall food costs down through receptivity to imports.
International trade and investment. Singapore has emphatically embraced free trade and worked zealously to encourage multinational firms, particularly their headquarters units, to base themselves locally, with a special focus on services.
National security. This city-state retains relations of trust with both the U.S. and other large powers, contributing to regional security through joint exercises, information exchanges, and ad hoc provision of facilities, without an extensive foreign troop presence or formal alliance ties.
Diplomacy. Singapore maintains dynamic and intense relations with bodies at all levels of the international system, including nations, cities, and supranational as well as multilateral bodies, maximizing its unique advantages as a city-state. It also deftly finesses ideological and geopolitical conflict, simultaneously maintaining constructive relations with the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Israel, the Arab world, and Russia, without losing the trust and regard of the United States. It also operates with unusual local political effect in Washington, D.C.
Transnational partnerships. To an unusual degree, Singapore appreciates the power and value of transnational intellectual exchanges and works to systematically nurture them by becoming a smart global hub. It fills this role by attracting foreign investment and by supporting, through the National Research Foundation, strategic partnerships that link Singapore’s own institutions and world-class universities overseas, particularly in the sciences and engineering.
Global contribution. Although one of the smallest nation-state members of the international system, Singapore retains formidable influence beyond its shores without overseas military deployments or an extensive foreign-aid program. It maximizes “soft power” principally through the way it exports its own efficient, technologically enabled domestic practices, especially those relating to urban development. It often does so on a mutually agreeable commercial basis, through such mechanisms as training programs, turnkey construction projects, and consulting arrangements such as those of the successful e-government consulting firm Crimson Logic. Singapore also gains respect by serving as a catalyst in the realization of broadly accepted global goals such as the creation of global and regional free trade regimes.
Shadows? Of course, no nation is perfect—in domestic practices, social organization, or approach to international affairs. Like many globalized societies, including the United States, Singapore seems to be afflicted with deepening social and economic inequality, which has its greatest impact on transient residents. Rising real-estate prices—ironically reflecting the desirability of living there—compound inequality of assets. Singapore also has a low birth rate, is relying more and more on potentially restive foreign guest workers, and could be experiencing a gradual middle-class disaffection with the one-party dominance that has brought much prosperity and innovation in the past.
Self-correction mechanisms. Although Singapore’s policies and their consequences do have some dysfunctional aspects, the city-state also has unusual, smart self-correction mechanisms, particularly a strong market reliance, rooted in its exposed character as a diminutive actor in a much larger global system. It also has unique institutions with unusual self-corrective features, such as its Economic Development Board, and—at least so far—a crisis-oriented and self-reflective leadership that has shown an ability to adjust course in response to new challenges. In harnessing the promise of the Digital Revolution, the deepening technological bias embodied in smart-nation, smart-state Singapore helps minimize the overcrowding and social unease that a more traditional manufacturing or resource-sector bias like that of its Asian neighbors might engender. Singapore’s continued relevance as a global laboratory will depend fatefully on whether it can remain sensitive to global trends and still employ these self-reflective and self-correcting features.
Implications for Theory
This review of Singapore public policy affirms the potential global importance of “virtual states”—actors of limited scale with high concentrations of expertise—in international relations today. It suggests, however, that finer distinctions need to be made among those virtual states. Such entities can operate flexibly at multiple levels of international affairs—national, transnational, and subnational—often simultaneously. They can also respond rapidly to international developments—a valuable and, for them, indispensable trait in the volatile globalized world now emerging.
Domestic institutions, in particular, bear close inspection, because they can critically affect the stability and responsiveness of virtual states to strong external pressures. In Singapore’s case, distinctive, cross-sectoral institutions like the Economic Development Board substantially augment responsiveness, as well as policy integration. Others, such as the Housing and Development Board, markedly enhance stability. The character of these institutions may well enable Singapore to respond to, and capitalize on, globalization more effectively than many other virtual states can, including some of those in the Middle East.
Singapore’s successes in this regard raise questions about the empirical relevance and heuristic value in the 21st century of the developmental state model, highly fashionable a generation ago. Many nation-states, especially those in East Asia, continue to rely on “plan-rational,” state-directed efforts, specifying priority sectors to transform their economies, as that older model prescribes. Bureaucratic actors may be at a disadvantage, however, both in understanding and in responding to the accelerating pace of global change, especially given the dangers of clientelism and routinization that beset them, even when they do enjoy some degree of embedded autonomy. By comparison, the smart-state paradigm offers a more realistic prescription for governance today in its emphasis on a state’s ability to comprehend and respond pragmatically to outside forces, using technological supports where possible, but without an overambitious roadmap. Singapore provides a good example of a smart state in operation that is more relevant in today’s volatile, uncertain global world than the confident developmental state models of yesteryear in the vein of Chalmers Johnson’s MITI.
As outlined earlier in this book, a variety of bureaucratic pathologies, described by Stigler, Downs, Crozier, and others, can potentially distort nation-state behavior. Nevertheless, such maladies, not to mention the developmentalist paradigm, can be avoided while still according respect or even precedence to elite officials. Transparency, through e-government, together with the embedded bureaucratic distance from regulated institutions generated through the use of statutory boards can, for example, arrest clientelist tendencies of bureaucratic relations with private firms that George Stigler feared. This research thus suggests the limits to some classic theoretical critiques of bureaucratic management, with Singapore as an outlying case that illustrates ways to transcend state shortcomings.
In illustrating ways to transcend state shortcomings, Singapore’s outlying case expands upon classic theoretical critiques of bureaucratic management, confirming the pitfalls of an uncritically positive view of bureaucratic capabilities—particularly in directing major changes in economic life. Elite bureaucratic players rarely have the wisdom and political capacity to lead a strategic transformation of economic structure, especially in an era of massive and deregulated transnational capital flows. Volatility and uncertainty in the globalizing world, coupled with the underlying lack of incentives for risk-taking in the traditional bureaucratic state, particularly with respect to transnational undertakings, make strategic, future-oriented bureaucratic management of economic affairs implausible today, if it ever was. More market input and calculated state support for entrepreneurship and transnational enterprise are clearly needed.
The Singapore case also validates the concept of the smart state—an entity that efficiently perceives and responds to external challenge (geographical, demographic, financial, political, technological) and to markets, using the latest advances in ICT technology, without presuming to direct the course of events in dirigiste fashion. Singapore became smart through political and organizational innovation that optimized prospects for harnessing the Digital Revolution.
Cities, like states, can also become smart, thereby solving problems efficiently and enhancing their role in international affairs. The constructive role of cities in world affairs is gaining attention in the face of grassroots problems that are in contrast to the political and ideological preoccupations of nation-states. Cities, many argue, can be uniquely effective both in advancing democracy and in addressing pressing global socioeconomic challenges that have a mundane grassroots dimension. Indeed, Singapore’s example suggests that smart cities can play a pivotal and globally significant socioeconomic role—on such issues as the environment and transportation—although there need not be a correlation to grassroots democracy. Singapore’s experience also shows the importance of the symbolic role that smart cities can play as manageable laboratories for policy innovation.
In concrete policy terms, a systematic understanding of best-practice cases and the smart mechanisms for disseminating them can be a useful guide for addressing global problems. As Micklethwait and others have recently emphasized, there is a growing consensus that the Western “entitlements” model of public policy is today facing enormous financial and political constraints, especially when applied to the problems of heavily populated developing nations. The Singapore model holds special potential for addressing such problems through its distinctive elements—institutions, uses of technology, leadership structures, and personnel arrangements—and the supportive leadership and personnel structures that turn aspirations into innovative reality. Concretely, Singapore’s example suggests how to create not only livable cities (a challenge of particular importance in the populous, traditionally rural developing world) but also fiscally viable welfare states (highly relevant in economically advanced nations as well).
Issues for Future Research
There seems little question in retrospect that Singapore’s response to the social, economic, and political challenges the city-state has confronted over the past half century has been remarkable. Cross-national surveys repeatedly rank it among the most effective national systems on earth. Most of these analyses present Singapore’s impressive policy profile as a homogeneous unit, carried out under the general leadership of the late Lee Kuan Yew. Without depreciating Lee’s historic and extraordinary contribution to the early phase of Singapore’s development in any way, this research also highlights the innovative contribution in later years of Goh Chok Tong and Lee Hsien Loong. Their roles surely merit further research and commentary, as does Singapore’s enlightened response to globalization and digitalization.
The very first pages of this book noted shadows on the remarkable story of Singapore’s growth and transformation, including the challenges of migration and socioeconomic inequity. A flood of both guest workers and well-heeled foreigners into Singapore is putting pressure on sociopolitical stability and the viability of Singapore’s middle class. How these trends, exacerbated by globalization, will affect Singapore’s future is a subject of major importance.
Although the outstanding success of Singapore’s smart-state, smart-city paradigm cannot be denied, especially in comparative perspective, what is not so clear is to what extent Singapore’s experience is transferable to other parts of the world today, or how relevant its performance of the past will be to the global future. That subject clearly requires more careful research.
Diffusion processes will obviously be crucial in determining when and how the concrete practices embedded in the Singapore “smart-city, smart state” model will be transmitted to the broader world. One distinctive empirical finding of this work, with prospective theoretical significance for future research on international relations, is the concept of a smart global hub. Socioeconomic communities like Singapore’s “One-North,” including Biopolis, Fusionopolis, and Medianopolis, are important nodes for diffusion—both into and out of smart states and smart cities. The operation and global functional role of these emerging smart hubs deserve further study.
Chapter 6 noted that many nations, cities, and NGOs around the world are already trying to emulate Singapore’s experience. Most of these efforts, however, have begun in the very recent past—mainly over the past five years—so the verdict is still out on their success. More systematic analysis, particularly concerning the importance to success of unique Singaporean institutional features such as the EDB, HDB, CPF, and Temasek Holding, as well as Singapore’s hybrid smart-city–smart-state character, is needed to understand the degree to which the Singapore policy paradigm is transferable elsewhere.
There is also, of course, the normative question of desirability. Even if Singapore’s experience is transferable, is it really something that other nations or cities should seek to emulate? And at what level—national or simply municipal? Singapore’s policies do have a moralistic, neoliberal, and in some ways soft-authoritarian tone, despite their democratic form. They clearly have a powerful attraction, especially as subnational solutions, in China and other nations with similarly daunting challenges of governance. But how desirable would they be elsewhere?
The future relevance of Singapore as a laboratory to the world also relates profoundly to prospects for the global future itself. Should one envision, as a paradigm of sociopolitical organization, a future in which, as Benjamin Barber hypothesizes, “mayors rule the world”?1 Or, alternatively, should it be a “new feudalism” model of decentralized decisionmaking and influence, as Tanaka Akihiko forecasts, in which small and medium-size national powers have greater maneuverability than in the past?2 In terms of socioeconomic evolution, will it be dominated by growth and urban transition, especially within the developing world, which will cause housing, transport, and environmental problems to mount? If such trends are in prospect, as seems likely, the future relevance of Singapore’s past and present to the global future will be a powerful one that cannot be ignored.
Implications for Future Policy
The future relevance of Singapore as a laboratory for the world of course depends upon prospects for Singapore’s own ability to track and respond to global trends and also on the evolution of those trends themselves. Cautious confidence seems warranted on both counts. Singapore can be expected to continue being adaptive and globally oriented, even as the urban and environmental issues on which it has pioneered global best practice—particularly the construction and sustenance of smart cities—become increasingly important for the world as a whole.
Circumstances thus far strongly point to Singapore’s potential as such a laboratory, especially in the realm of smart cities. Many countries would do well to recognize the city-state’s achievements, particularly its neighbors—the teeming nations of East, Southeast, and South Asia, such as China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. They are currently undergoing a historic urban transition that makes Singapore’s successes at housing, transportation, energy efficiency, and environmental protection of special relevance. In the longer run, the same transition will likely accelerate in Africa and parts of Latin America, making Singapore’s experience increasingly relevant there as well.
The epic urban transition of the global present and future is clearly a matter of central concern to multilateral development institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, and other regional financial institutions. They, too, need to know more, and in more detail, about Singapore’s experience; their propensity to study Singapore and to interact with it is already increasing, virtually every day. The same imperative exists for national development agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, Japan International Cooperation Agency, and Korea International Cooperation Agency. As Japan is by a substantial margin the largest donor country in Asia, the potential for bilateral cooperation between its development agency and Singapore should be especially great. And the prospects for Singapore-Korean cooperation are also substantial.
Bilateral collaboration between China and Singapore has been dynamic within China but slow to expand to include third countries, for understandable historical reasons. Yet cooperation between the two in broader multilateral contexts could become highly dynamic in future years as well. This could be especially true should China-centric institutions such as infrastructure banks, which would likely do much to promote smart city development, become more prominent on the global scene. The advent of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank (formerly the BRICS Bank), both with their locus in China, will make a pattern of deepening Singapore-China cooperation in multilateral contexts increasingly likely.
If Singapore’s expertise does indeed have powerful international relevance, especially to emerging trends in the developing world, multinational firms need to pay attention also. Such trends should bolster the rationale for partnerships with Singaporean firms and government entities, already strong. It should also strengthen the rationale for investment in Singapore, thus augmenting its role as a laboratory for the world. The potential synergies between enlightened multinational interest and Singapore’s emerging global role would appear to be strong.
The rationale for deeper scholarly understanding of the Singapore model is also compelling, especially in public-policy schools. Singapore, after all, appears to represent global best practice, with its unusual responsiveness to the Digital Revolution and IoT, in many sectors of the political economy, including transportation, energy efficiency, electronic governance, and smart-city development. Harvard Business School and other such institutions have already done case studies on its overall economic development policies.3 Yet more refined work is needed, benchmarking Singapore, on specific government bodies, para-public structures, sectoral policies, and institutional prerequisites for smart-state development in the Internet age.
Toward An Invigorated Global Policy Dialogue
As globalization proceeds with increasing momentum around the world, and as mutual interdependence rises, the importance of transnational policy dialogue increases as well. Although domestic institutions and macroeconomic circumstances will no doubt continue to vary substantially around the world, the very reality of growing interdependence and of pressure to conform to common global imperatives makes at least a consideration of best-practice solutions from elsewhere vital. Many of these solutions are complex and unappreciated domestically in key nations, making public-consciousness raising a further reason for invigorated global policy dialogues.
Singapore appears to have developed a formidable array of those best-practice solutions—relevant to industrial and developing nations alike. Its smart state has pioneered minimalist, enabling solutions, addressing the crisis of the welfare state as well as the challenges of economic development. Its smart city is coping, in microcosm, with housing, transportation, energy, health care, and environmental challenges through innovative, technology-driven approaches that likewise bear broader consideration, especially in the developing world.
Singapore, as a small city-state in a turbulent world, thus has deep stakes in a cooperative global system, with much to contribute to an intensified and truly global domestic-policy dialogue. The New Synthesis project on new frontiers in public administration—involving Canada, Brazil, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Australia, as well as Singapore—has made an important recent start in this process, focusing on such important shared global problems as health care, global warming, and criminal justice.4
An expansion of such dialogue, from a holistic perspective that transcends the narrow regulatory concerns of specific agencies, or the parochial perspectives of individual nations, is very much in the global interest. Such dialogue will no doubt intensify Singapore’s role as a constructive and multifaceted laboratory for a more integrated and interdependent world that is even now emerging, driven by the historic transformations of the Digital Revolution.