The Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to significant, social, economic and public health implications for Singapore. As of writing, the number of confirmed Covid-19 infections in Singapore has exceeded 55,000 while 27 people have passed away due to complications arising from the coronavirus. The rapid rise in Covid-19 infections had also prompted the Singapore government to implement a ācircuit breakerā on 7 April 2020. The circuit breaker acted as a de facto lock down by placing restrictions on social and economic activities.
The economic implications of the pandemic are equally, if not more, dire. According to a Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) survey, the Singapore economy is expected to contract by 5.8% in 2020 (CNA 2020). In June 2020, Singapore reported its highest unemployment rate in a decade, with total employment shrinking by 25,600 in the first quarter of 2020 (Phua 2020). This decline in total employment was higher than that during the SARS crisis (24,000) and 2009 Global Financial Crisis (8000).
The impacts of the pandemic has also spilled over into the social sphere, with mental health helplines reporting a surge in number of calls from individuals seeking help and counselling services (Phua and Ang 2020). In all instances, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought forth severe implications for Singapore and posed steep challenges for its policymakers and businesses.
As Prime Minister Lee had mentioned in the above-quoted May Day 2020 message, the Covid-19 pandemic is truly a challenge for Singaporeās current generation of policy-makers and citizens. The Prime Minister also alluded in his speech to a set of āforbearersā whom this current generation is supposedly accountable to. This mention of forbearers is rooted in the understanding that the challenges that Singapore currently faces are not entirely new.
Just 17 years ago, Singapore was affected by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) pandemic, which swept through East Asia and infected 238 individuals in Singapore, with 33 of these individuals eventually losing their lives. Similar to the Covid-19 pandemic, the SARS virus had entered Singapore through air travel, with infected persons entering Singapore and subsequently spreading the virus to their close contacts.
More importantly, Singaporeās experience with the SARS crisis had yielded valuable policy lessons for its policymakers, with some these lessons culminating in several key policy initiatives and institutional developments that were enacted prior to and during the Covid-19 pandemic. These policy initiatives and institutional developments, what I term policy capacity in this book, have contributed to Singaporeās response to the Covid-19 pandemic in many ways.
In this book, I will discuss the policy capacities that were developed in the aftermath of the SARS crisis and which had contributed to the Singapore governmentās response to the Covid-19 pandemic. These capacities include healthcare infrastructure such as isolation wards, efficient contact tracing processes, and the ability to develop technological tools to assist in the governmentās Covid-19 response efforts, among many other types of capacities. I will also identify the new policy capacities that were established during and after the Covid-19 pandemic and discuss how these capacities will help prepare Singapore for future pandemics.
At the same time, Singaporeās Covid-19 response has also faced several set-backs and limitations. This is especially the case for the large infection clusters that had emerged in the city-stateās migrant worker dormitories. As I will discuss in the rest of this book, these shortcomings can mostly be traced to limitations or deficiencies in analytical capacity. These deficiencies had led to the formation of analytical blind-spots, preventing policymakers from accurately assessing the infection risks that resided in Singaporeās densely-populated and migrant worker dormitories.
This has in turn given rise to a dual-track outcome in Singaporeās Covid-19 response. While the city-state has been successful in minimising Covid-19-related fatalities and curbing the spread of the virus within its citizen population, the formation of large infection clusters in its migrant worker dormitories had given rise to its high infection rates. This raises a further question: how have such high levels of infection occurred in a high-capacity country such as Singapore?
As I will show in the rest of this book, taking a policy capacity approach allows for the deeper understanding of how this dual-track outcomeālow fatalities and low community transmission but high rates of infectionāhad arisen. The story of Singaporeās experience with the Covid-19 pandemic is essentially centred on policy capacity, with its success driven by prescient capacity-building efforts and effective mobilisation of these efforts and shortcomings in its early efforts to minimise infection rates attributable to limitations in certain capacities.
Taking a policy capacity approach can therefore provide a clear, objective and systematic understanding of Singaporeās Covid-19 response efforts, as well as the areas which policymakers may consider enhancing or strengthening, in order to ensure greater effectiveness in Singaporeās future responses to any potential pandemics that may emerge in the horizon.
Beyond Resource Optimisation: Capacity-Building and Robustness
Policy capacity is an emerging analytical framework that is becoming increasingly relevant in public policy scholarly work. I will discuss the emergence of evolution of this theoretical concept in Chapter 2. It suffices for now to say that taking a policy capacity approach allows for a more systematic and policy-oriented approach that focuses on the resources and capacities that policymakers can establish to address future pandemics.
Like all black swan events, pandemics are inherently unpredictable. Despite the best efforts of futurists and scenario planners, it is often impossible to predict the emergence of a global pandemic. However, it is possible to establish ahead of time the institutional and policy capacities that can be mobilised upon the onset of a pandemic. Focusing on policy capacity-building therefore allows policymakers to focus on what they can do, i.e. developing tools and resources, rather than policy goals that cannot be achieved, such as predicting exactly when a pandemic will take place.
It should also be noted that focusing on policy capacity for future pandemics essentially means setting aside excess capacities and resources during ordinary times, with the expectation that these resources and capacities can be quickly mobilised during a pandemic or any other type of crisis. Such an endeavour can be costly and even ideologically problematic, especially with the continued popularity of New Public Management (NPM) practices in governments across the world.
Having emerged in the early 1990s and gained popularity among policy scholars and practitioners through the 2000s, the NPM movement has become the dominant model of public management. At the heart of the NPM movement is an emphasis on cost minimisation and resource optimisation, ostensibly achieved through the contracting out and outsourcing of public services as well as the privatisation of public agencies (Osborne and Gaebler 1993; Dunleavy and Hood 1994; Hood 1995; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011).
Closely related to the NPM movement is Rational Choice Theory, a public policy theoretical approach that is based on economics and which seeks to model economic and social behaviour on the basis of individual preferences, with these preferences assumed to follow ārationalā and quasi-utilitarian logics of cost minimisation and benefit-maximisation (Ostrom 1991; Stewart 1993, 1993, Neimun and Stambough 1998). From this perspective, government decisions are predicated upon similar logics of cost-minimisation and impact-maximisation.
In any case, idle resources and organisational slack would be anathema to most practitioners and theorists of NPM and Rational Choice Theory. NPM has been particularly popular among governments and policymakers in Southeast Asia...