Singaporeâs authoritarian developmental state, governed uninterruptedly by the Peopleâs Action Party (PAP) since 1959, is at a critical crossroads. The PAPâs âgrowth with equityâ social compact that dominated the early post-independence era had been integral to the city-stateâs economic ascendency to First World status. This social compact was based on improving the material welfare and social mobility of the majority of Singaporeans in the rapidly modernising economy and societyâostensibly based on principles of meritocracy and multiracialism. The social compact, however, appears to have unravelled, with political consequences that are not yet clear.
The unravelling of the âgrowth with equityâ social compact arguably represents a critical junctureâtriggered by the selective embrace of neo-liberal policies by the technocratic PAP leadership from about the mid-1980s. This technocratic leadership has been co-opted from the elite echelons of the civil service and the officer corps of the Singapore Armed Forces. They entered parliament and Cabinet with minimal prior political activism or civil society experience (Barr 2014). Predisposed to a conservative and groupthink mind-set, PAP technocrats undertook wide-ranging privatisation and corporatisation of social services, beginning with health, and then moving on to transport and housing. Even without the checks and balances typically found in robust democracies, some of these initiatives faced political obstacles that delayed full implementation. Yet the delays could not stop the eventual rollout, with predictable consequencesâstructural shifts in the labour market, resulting in significant wage stagnation, systemic impediments to social mobility and widening levels of income inequality in the 1990s and beyond (Rahim 2015). âGrowth with equityâ morphed seamlessly into âgrowth without equityâ, and unsurprisingly this change has generated numerous policy failures and electoral backlashes that have weakened the stature of the PAP leadership. The political and administrative consequences of this development have become particularly acute since the current Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, came to office in 2004. Lee and the technocratic PAP leadership have preserved the authoritarian governance structures and continue to be âsaddled with the belief that trickle-down economics works⊠[together with] relatively thin social safety nets and limited fiscal redistributionâ (Low and Vadaketh 2014, p. 211).
The city-stateâs spending on social services is among the lowest in the industrialised economies of East Asia (Haggard and Krugman 2008, p. 244). In keeping with the PAP leadershipâs neo-liberal worldview, corporate taxes have remained relatively low at 17 per cent while the regressive Goods and Services Tax (GST) is set to increase- from 7 to 9 per cent sometime between 2012 and 2025 (Lam, 2018). Yet, Singaporeâs military spending is the sixth highest in the world, at about 4 per cent of GDP (The Economist 2012). This exorbitant military expenditure is consistent with the city-stateâs hawkish foreign and defence policy orientationâstrongly shaped by former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and the current PAP leadershipâs paranoia of neighbouring Malay and Muslim countries to the immediate north and south (Rahim 2009).
Unlike the pioneering Northeast Asian developmental states of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan that have transitioned to robust plural democracies, Singaporeâs developmental state has remained one-party-dominant and authoritarian despite possessing a sizeable educated middle class and an economy that is touted as one of the wealthiest in GDP per capita terms. This anomaly has confounded many political observers, particularly for contradicting theories of political development. At the same time, this anomaly has inspired other rapidly industrialising authoritarian developmental states such as China and Vietnam (Ortmann and Thompson 2014).
In the tradition of the developmental states in Northeast Asia such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, Singaporeâs developmental state is underpinned by competent public institutions, bureaucratic capacity and embeddedness, but has yet to experience the process of âstrong state democratisationâ (Slater 2012). Singaporeâs PAP government is essentially a competitive/electoral authoritarian regime where
democratic institutions are abused by the incumbent government so that their opponents are disadvantaged ⊠[and the political] playing field is heavily skewed in favour of the incumbent. Competition is thus real but unfair. (Levitsky and Way 2009, p. 5)
In such regimes, authoritarian governance occurs behind institutional facades of representation, but continues to suffer from electoral uncertainties as the hold on power is never secure (Schedler 2013, pp. 1â4). To contain these electoral uncertainties and stymie the growth of opposition parties, major institutional reforms to the electoral, political and public housing systems have been implemented. They include the ongoing revisions to the Group Representation Constituency (GRC) , Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP), Ethnic Residential Quotas (commonly referred to as the Ethnic Integration Policy), Non-Constituency Member of Parliament (NCMP) and the Elected Presidency. In more robust democracies, these constitutional, political and electoral engineering revisions would have been challenged via the courts for violating democratic principles, processes and systems.
Strong state democratisation in South Korea and Taiwan has ushered forth improvements in social protection and services such as education and healthâtranscending their former reputation as welfare laggards. These democratic developmental states are now moving towards becoming providers of comprehensive social protection and something close to universal health care coverage (Peng and Wong 2008). This policy development is consistent with other developed economies in Western Europe. By contrast, Singaporeâs authoritarian developmental state has continued to resist the provision of comprehensive social welfare despite being one of the most unequal (in income inequality terms) developed economiesâand consistently more unequal than the democratic developmental states of Northeast Asia. Even though Singaporeâs income inequality remains one of the widest amongst developed economies, the PAP government remains averse to income redistribution and continues to encourage self-reliance, family and community self-help and philanthropy. As Rahim and Yeoh highlight in Chap. 4, this aversion to income redistribution has placed considerable economic pressures on the unemployed, low-income workers and the agedâpressures which culminated in electoral backlash against the PAP in 2011.
Since the 2011 electoral backlash and even before that to a lesser extent, economic and social policy reforms have been implemented, but they remain largely piecemeal at a time when bold approaches are required. The eugenics-inspired early streaming education policy, for instance, began being watered down in the first half of the 2000s, but remains substantially intact even today. Meanwhile, the unpopular high-growth population policy, which opened anew the floodgates to cheap overseas labour in the middle of the 2000s, has been subjected to only minor modifications. Hence low-wage (foreign) labour continues to fuel Singaporeâs location in the neo-liberal economic order (Rodan 2016).
In marked contrast to the democratic developmental states of Northeast Asia, Singaporeâs development model remains substantially unchangedâdriven by Government-Linked Companies (GLCs) and foreign Multinational Corporations (MNCs). While the South Korea and Taiwanese developmental states spent big on building a domestic research and development culture and cultivated the rise of local private capital that have become international brand names (such as Acer, Samsung and Hyundai), the only Singaporean companies with high-profile international brand names are Singapore Airlines and Changi Airport, which are intrinsically international anyway because of the nature of the airline industry. The attempts to build creative new hubs of innovation have relied almost entirely on âforeign talentâ (Goh 2016).
The city-stateâs continued reliance on huge injections of capital and foreign labour, whilst maintaining sluggish productivity levels (particularly since the 1990s), have prompted some economists to question the sustainability of the Singaporean developmental state âafter the miracleâ of industrial catch-up. Lim (2014) contends that Singaporeâs twentieth-century development paradigm, based largely on quantum inputs rather than productivity, is more viable for developing middle-income economies with under-utilised resources rather than the high-income economy that Singapore has become. Lim (2016, p. 11) also asserts that
a consensus has emerged among economists, policy makers and local business leaders that the Singapore development model of the past 50 years is no longer viable, or adequate to deliver improved living standards for the citizen population.
Perceptions of policy inertia and drift have been reinforced by the Committee on the Future Economy (CFE) Report 2016. Deliberated during a period of on-going economic sluggishness, the report has largely adopted a âmore of the sameâ orientation rather than a bold re-charting of the Singapore development paradigm. The reportâs recommendations are remarkably similar to earlier economic statementsâsuch as the 2010 Economic Strategies Committee Report and the 2003 Economic Review Committee Report. This then raises the salient questions: Has the political economy of Singaporeâs authoritarian developmental state reached its limits in terms of improving living standards and ensuring social protection for the population? To what extent can this policy inertia be attributed to the technocratic structures of PAP governance? And are these structures less than conducive to the innovation and entrepreneurship required by the innovative knowledge industries that underpin mature developed economies?
In his comparative study of biotechnology industries in South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, Wong (2011) posits that the targeting of knowledge industries such as life sciences and biotechnology may be too risky, uncertain and complex to succeed, particularly in developmental states such as Singapore that are tightly coordinated from above. Singapore aspires to be a global biomedical hub, but so far has âlittle to show for their efforts and investment zeal. Their bets have yet to pay off, and the prospects of failure loom largeâ (Wong 2011, p. 1). Since the mid-1990s, billions have been invested in high-tech research on projects such as the Science Park, Technopreneurship 21 and Biopolis. The city-stateâs research and development (R&D) spending relative to GDP approximates that of Japan and South Korea. Unlike Japan and Korea, however, the R&D resources are largely derived from state investment rather than the private sector (Carney 2016, p. 156).
Carney and Loh (2009) purport that Singaporeâs conflicting institutional arrangements have contributed to innovation stagnation, particularly evident within Singapore-owned firms, and that much of the patenting activity comes from MNCs. To what extent, then, is this innovation stagnation due to Singaporeâs highly fluid labour market, characterised by the absence of minimum wages, laws prohibiting the arbitrary firing of workers and an autonomous labour movement? Instructively, the Global Competitiveness Report credits the city-state for being one of the easiest places in the world to hire and fire workers. This fluid labour market engenders job insecurity and discourages incremental innovation and long-term worker commitment to the firm. More often than not, incremental innovation tends to be generated when workers feel secure enough to risk ideas that could possibly jeopardise their own job. To address these institutional limitations, Carney and Loh (2009, pp. 313â314) recommend strengthening employment stability as a means of engendering incremental innovation. They also recommend that the government divest its stakes in GLCs so that local private capital is in a stronger position to drive economic policy making.
Developmental state theorist Peter Evans (2010, pp. 49â50) posits that in the twenty-first century, an effective developmental state requires the building of organisational capacity based on a more extensive form of embeddednessâcompared to developmental states of the previous century. In particular, this more encompassing form of embeddedness ventures beyond close relationships between senior bureaucrats and small groups of industrial elites. What is arguably required in the twenty-first century is a form of âdeliberative developmentâ based on âco-productionââso as to develop economic strategies and public policies based on active engagement and âdemocratic dialogueâ with societal actors. This active engagement with a much broader cross-section of society serves to develop effective state-society linkages in determining economic goals.
Newer forms of embeddedness and deliberation in state-society relations require multiple channels for sourcing accurate information, in addition to the cultivation of feedback loops that are critical to implementing policy corrections and innovation. In this process of embeddedness and deliberation, the varied arms of autonomous civil society are critical as âhighly sensitive sensors that both transmit information to states and transmit information about states and state actions back to societyâ (Evans and Heller 2015, p. 691). Civil society thus constitutes a key interlocutor in the decision-making processes of the democratic developmental state in the twenty-first century. In Singapore, however, civil society continues to be carefully monitored and stifled by inadequate access to information.
Authoritarian developmental states are constrained by top-down command and control p...