Singapore is a poor development model - Asia Times article
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Singapore a poor model for Myanmar
By William Barnes
BANGKOK - When Myanmar's reforming President Thein Sein visited Singapore in January, officials there offered lessons on how to modernize and attract foreign investment. Singapore's eagerness to court Myanmar's ruling generals has been a diplomatic feature of the international community's two decades of trying to crack open the reclusive country.
Now that Asia's "next economic frontier" has started to open up, Singapore - where Myanmar's senior generals bank and seek hospital treatment - is keen to offer itself as a dazzling example of how to become a first-world economy within a couple of generations.It's a siren call that should be resisted, said Rodney King, the Australian author of the controversial book Singapore: Myth and Reality.
"Singapore is not a good development model and not one a developing country should follow. Singapore has basically conned the world about its nation-building achievement," said King. "It is frightening that they should regard Singapore as a good model to follow."
Years of robust growth in Singapore were driven initially by waves of foreign capital into the city-state and more recently by the import of foreign workers, who now make up one-third of the population. The government's jealous husbanding of much of the economy, meanwhile, has rendered impotent much of the nation's faculty for creative business.
"Its entrepreneurial, innovative capacity is quite small. It's got a very small local private sector, unlike say South Korea and Taiwan, where there are vigorous entrepreneurial cultures. In Singapore, they don't really have that," said King, who spent many years working in the island-state.
It is unlikely that Singapore says this in its diplomatic and commercial outreach to Myanmar. Ashfaqur Rahman, chairman of the Center for Foreign Affairs Studies in Bangladesh, had no doubt what Singapore hopes for when he noted how it shunned the previous Western policy of making a pariah of the ruling junta.
"The basis of this strategy was to gain from a relationship which was essentially economic. Singapore invested heavily in Myanmar and traded with her. It even pushed other [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] members to allow Myanmar to join the regional organization."
Myanmar citizens, who for decades have been mired in corrupt economic lethargy, are no doubt dazzled by Singapore's success in turning a former modest British trading hub into a confident modern nation with a per capita income among the highest in the world.
Remarkably an island state with just 1% of Southeast Asia's population still attracts nearly half of its foreign direct investment. Yet this success has come "at considerable costs in terms of independent development, human rights, freedom, and workers rights", according to an academic paper published last year.
That part of the economy not in foreign hands is dominated by government-controlled institutions run by the local nomenklatura. Keeping an every present watch is the People's Action Party (PAP), which has run virtually a one-party state since independence.
"One of the key features of the Singapore model is that the commanding heights of the economy are controlled by the state - directly or indirectly. Burma [Myanmar] had all its state enterprises taken over in 1962 by [the late general] Ne Win, which has just dragged the economy into the ground," said King.
"If they were going to follow the Singapore model they would be just repeating the mistakes that they have already made. Singapore crushes individual enterprise but [Myanmar] is going to need all the enterprise it can possibly muster to get over 50 years of chronic warfare and political repression."
King's criticism might have less sting given Singapore's wealth were it not also echoed by an increasing number of complaints rising from within the city-state. Indeed, many now question whether the "Singapore model" is still valid. In last year's general election the ruling party won its lowest share of the vote since independence.
Productivity gains have been notoriously weak for decades, hardly what the casual observer might imagine from a country regularly ranked as one of the most competitive.
The American economist Paul Krugman infuriated Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew 20 years ago by claiming Singapore's growth could be explained by more of everything - capital and labor - except efficiency.
Ever since the launch of the "Teamy the Productivity Bee" campaign three decades ago, the government mantra has been to focus on generating greater added value. Despite myriad training initiatives, worker productivity has barely grown by 1% a year in the new millennium.
Growth has been sustained by an inflow of foreigners that has doubled the island's population since 1980, with foreigners and non-Singapore born citizens now representing three-fifths of the population. "We've grown in the last five years by just importing labor," said Lee Kuan Yew himself in 2010.
The country arguably hasn't maximized that influx. "They imported all these scientists and technicians from all over the world but the outcome has been fairly modest. These people have found working in a bureaucratic structure quite stifling," said King. The authorities "spend tons of money on resources but the ambience isn't there really. They seem to be able to attract talent, but when they get them they can't operate the way that they want."
Equality gap
Singapore shone in the headlines again recently when one of Facebook's founders, Eduardo Saverin, was revealed to have given up his United States passport in favor of residency in Singapore to "invest like crazy."
Saverin joins an elite of super-rich floating on top of an ordinary public, many of whom struggle to make ends meet in an increasingly expensive city. The bottom half of the population experienced either falling real income, or no gain in income, over most of the last decade.
High inequality levels have combined with falling social mobility, reinforcing the grip of the privileged upper class to the point where even the government recognizes this threatens the social compact.
One of the city-state's most respected economists, Professor Lim Chong Yah, said in April that the city's Gini coefficient (a measure of equality) of 0.47 was approaching the "danger level" of 0.5 when typically income inequality starts to tear at a country's social fabric. He has advocated a "shock" therapy of pay rises for workers and tax penalties for the rich.
King estimates one-fifth of the population lives in poverty as measured by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development standards. "They have been able to attracts lots of foreign direct investment … at the cost of Singaporean living standards."
Singapore may now have passed some sort of inflexion point. The first two generations of PAP leaders have faded from the scene - aside of course from the Senior Lee himself - and the younger leaders do not seem to hold the power to cow the population as in the past.
"This has been a country of frightened, intimidated people. In the 1950s and '60s, Singaporeans were feisty, gung-ho people but Lee and co killed their spirit," said King.
This past timidity in the face of authority permitted a series of policy mistakes followed by awkward U-turns. One notable quirk came in 1970 when Lee discouraged big families after deciding the population was too high, only years later changing his mind to beg (rather comically) Singaporeans to breed more freely.
Over the years, careful observers have pointed out that Singapore's "success" owed much to being a small, compact island that made political and social control relatively easy, so enabling it to experiment with robust but effective national development strategies.
By contrast, Myanmar is an infinitely more complicated jigsaw of ethnic, geographic, economic and historic problems in a space that is one-thousand times bigger. "Vast, sprawling countries like Indonesia, (Myanmar) and Thailand … would find such strategies a great deal harder to implement," said King.
To be sure, Singapore's founding myth as a mosquito-infested swamp of palm plantations and kampong dwellers in 1965 is a compelling one for underdeveloped countries like Myanmar eager to learn the secrets of rapid enrichment.
Nothing could be further from the truth, however. In 1965, Singapore was one of the most developed cities in Asia in terms of industrial development, living standards and literacy of the population, argues King.
"Singapore's nation-building success, such as it is, was based on a set of highly favorable circumstances that are unlikely to be found elsewhere," he said.
Singapore surely must be praised for many things, not least its relatively clean dealings in a region benighted by corruption. But, if King's assessment is correct, then Myanmar might be wise to examine carefully the advice from an authoritarian state of growing inequality struggling with low productivity and rising social unhappiness.
William Barnes is a veteran Bangkok-based journalist.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.) -
so what is the alternative? can the author suggest a model better than the presented by singapore? however bad he thinks our model is it has over 47 yrs proven to be better than what many other countries have achieved. unless those countries better than us can give myanmar what they want then our model is still better than the present state of myanmar right?
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the lack of new products and entrepreneurship has been wasted by weekly reservist atheletic remedial trainings 365 days a year till age 40 or 45.by that time the mental state to create comoanies and new products would have lost most of its fire,energy and other stuff.
what this will do is make more cocksuckers,wayyang kings and people with insufficient knowledge to build any industries on their own.that explains the lack of local made companies in spore.
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Sg is the best.
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Originally posted by charlize:
Sg is the best.
sg is the best........to slow cook 6 million meat in a big clay pot. -
see......its back to innovation....
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Originally posted by dragg:
so what is the alternative?
can the author suggest a model better than the presented by singapore?
however bad he thinks our model is it has over 47 yrs proven to be better than what many other countries have achieved.
unless those countries better than us can give myanmar what they want then our model is still better than the present state of myanmar right?
What alternatives you want from William Barnes?
Willy is not interested in Myanmar, his target is Singapore.
His friends may be Francis Seow, Tang Liang Hong? He write on their behalf?
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Our model is certainly not the best, but is not that poor either. We built by FDI and continuous wave of labour. One thing for sure, we don't know when it will burst. Our population cannot keep growing forever.
Out of the so called Four Asian Tigers(Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea), we might really be the worst.
South Korea and Taiwan promote innovation. Singapore promotes stability(by strict laws and less workers' right). Let's see what happen in the future.
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Originally posted by Nigho17:
Our model is certainly not the best, but is not that poor either. We built by FDI and continuous wave of labour. One thing for sure, we don't know when it will burst. Our population cannot keep growing forever.
Out of the so called Four Asian Tigers(Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea), we might really be the worst.
South Korea and Taiwan promote innovation. Singapore promotes stability(by strict laws and less workers' right). Let's see what happen in the future.
Singapore will go forward manned by slaves and not very bright people who are not able to fight it out in life be it the physically strong.Only the ones who are bright would know they are short changed in early stages of life and know what to do after that.
singapore has as much innovation as the phillippines or malaysia or indonesia.they cant match up to taiwanese ,koreans,japanese or even the communist china in innovation because the taiwanese,koreans,japanese and china chinese think differently from the south east asians be it ethnic chinese etc.
singapores innovation is making up off fish import and export business and its side support industries with no innovation trhat would place any mark anywhere.the only one so far would be Creative industries by a Mr Sim which in comparison with other companies in korea or japan or taiwan see it placed as one of its average companies only.what and how spore go forward is by using stat board companies to hire design companies from usa or other outstanding companies worldwide to make its mark on the world from casinos,machineguns,computers,aircraft to tallest buildings and high tech stuff.all they ever needed was fundings from goverement by consolidating billions of dollars in funding from taxpayers and big payment for services rendered for small cheap stuff etc etc.spore does not build innovation but buys them as a whole mainly.they dont have dedicated people as in the past who can know whats really practical because in the past the old guards count every single penny even without an iso system.they are now mere supervisors and the ones they employ from overseas ought to be compensated generously for the services rendered.why ?because most sporeans now are not dedicated as in the past and arre now more confused and have no aim in life like the japanese in the 1970s to the japanese in the the year 2000.
spore will progress forward withhout doubt forever as long as hot food ,fundings and aircon is provided daily without due care from funding sources and wastage.ones at the top have no time to think if $1mil is wasted on lobster dinners or gold plated toilet seats daily.
even if u had the ability to build up companies like Creative industries Mr sim or a bill gates of microsoft....the gov with their reservist liabilities will ensure all the spare valuable time meant for advancement will be channled to their reservist ippt or atheletic remedial trainings every week till age 40 or above.by that time the mind will not be fast and fluid as it used to be.on the whole the mindset of spore innovation from pvt industries that are not related to the gov is remarkable similar to a cowboy town in the middle of nowhere where everyone concentrates on becoming goat herders ,shopkeepers and cowboys.they do earn way more than a lecturer at NUS or some engineer in spore.
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This is a similar post to mine at http://sgforums.com/forums/3317/topics/453606
I should post such stuffs in 'Speaker's Corner' next time.
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Creativity and innovation - 2 things that the other developing and developed countries have.