Singapore

I am having a lazy weekend in Singapore with just a couple of meetings to occupy myself.

I have been chatting to the ex-pats here and they all seem to be enjoying a boozy party life. When pushed though they proffer an opinion that Singapore is ‘not real’ and only good for a few years of their collective lives.

That got me thinking about the place.

It’s easy to criticise Singapore for being artificial and controlled, especially when contrasted to the rest of its Asian neighbours. But I can’t help feeling great admiration for the founders of this place.

What they have done is create a corruption-free pocket in Asia where Western businesses can feel safe in their Asian adventures. Like anywhere there is institutionalised corruption but the rules as printed can be relied upon, and that is all business needs to properly able to assess financial investment.

With regards to social policies we in Australia can quibble about certain of Singapore’s policies but generally tolerance in Singapore is high by Asia standards. The place was tough for a long while but how else to pull the place out of fishing village status? Now they are governing a bunch of self-entitled Chinese and Malays; I am not sure what else they could do to be honest. These things take time.

With the economic centre shifting to Shanghai, Singapore is trying to reinvent itself yet again. It will keep its trading activities but is now looking for another role and the obvious one is the Asian gate keeper for intellectual property rights. Even this will be hard because of the national nature of IP rights.

Then there is high-tech industries such as medical devices. Taiwan is probably better suited.

But Singapore does represent a consumer market in it’s own right so that will continue to generate economic growth.

Even so, over the next 20 years Singapore is going to need to strategize and execute very well. And hope that China does inevitably resort to old-school behaviours that scare the be-jesus out of Western companies.

The one black spot on the ledger is the mistreatment and exploitation of foreign workers. But this is condoned by all and sundry because everyone, especially the ex-pats, wants servants. It will come back to haunt them no matter what arguments they use to justify it.