Singapore

Smart City, Smart State

Kent E. Calder

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780815729488
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How Singapore’s solutions to common problems can provide examples for other societies. Nearly everyone knows that Singapore has one of the most efficient governments and competitive, advanced economies in the world. But can this unique city–state of some 5.5 million residents also serve as a model for other advanced economies as well as for the emerging world? Respected East Asia expert Kent Calder provides clear answers to this intriguing question in his new, groundbreaking book that looks at how Singapore’s government has harnessed information technology, data, and a focus on innovative, adaptive governance to become a model smart city, smart state.Calder describes Singapore as a laboratory for solutions to problems experienced by urban societies around the world. In particular, he shows how Singapore has dealt successfully with education, energy, environmental, housing, and transportation challenges; many of its solutions can be adapted in a wide range of other societies.Calder also explains how Singapore offers lessons for how countries can adapt their economies to the contemporary demands of global commerce. Singapore consistently ranks at the top in world surveys measuring competitiveness, ease of doing business, protection of intellectual property, and absence of corruption.The book offers concrete insights and a lucid appreciation of how Singapore's answers to near-universal problems can have a much broader relevance, even in very different societies.

1

Introduction

SINGAPORE AND A WORLD OF CHANGE

Ju an si wei, jie she yi jian

[Watch for danger in times of peace. Be thrifty in times of plenty.]

—CHANCELLOR WEI ZHENG (580–643)

Rarely in the course of human affairs has the pace of socioeconomic and political change been so rapid as since the mid-1990s. The cold war has ended, the former Soviet bloc has become a more integrated part of the global economy, and the Internet revolution has transformed societies of both the industrialized and developing worlds. Meanwhile, massive urbanization has created a complex new plethora of cities, large and small. Today over 54 percent of the world’s people live in cities—nearly double the ratio half a century ago. And by 2050 that ratio is expected to rise to two-thirds of the earth’s entire population.¹

Sweeping and accelerating global change has intensified the search for new institutional mechanisms and policy tools capable of dealing with such change. The traditional Western welfare state, relying on expensive universal entitlements to shield citizens from poverty, ill health, unemployment, and the vicissitudes of social transformation, has been found wanting. In country after country, beginning in Western Europe and then Japan and the United States, the welfare state has generated huge fiscal deficits, while arguably reducing impulses to save and to economize.²

At the international level, classical forms of organization, beginning with traditional empires like those of France, Britain, and the Soviet Union, have proved wanting as well. For their part, nation-states continue to struggle with the blistering pace of change in controlling multinational firms, as transnational relations among corporations, religious institutions, unions, and other types of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) grow more active.³ Even the utility and effectiveness of formal alliances between nations have come into question, especially in the developing world, as the skepticism manifested by emerging giants like India and China makes clear.⁴ Even the United Nations has not shown itself to be as effective as hoped.

If traditional nation-states—even the most efficient of them—have difficulty delivering the lightning-quick reactions and extraordinary levels of foresight needed to handle such changes, who can? What alternative modes of governance and what policy paradigms are viable in the new, global world now emerging? And who formulates and implements paradigms most effectively? With what consequences?

Why Singapore?

One of the greatest challenges for today’s rapidly changing world—one central to the concerns of this book—is the problem of governance. It lies in finding governmental structures that can cope effectively with the increasingly complex problems now faced by local, national, multinational, and supranational entities everywhere. This problem is especially perplexing for huge, rapidly developing societies like China, India, and Indonesia that aspire to the affluence and freedoms of the advanced Western nations but cannot afford or cannot countenance the costs and contentiousness of their welfare states.⁵

Speculation has begun on what form of governance might suit the 21st century’s global circumstances. In both the West and beyond, there is a growing consensus that any future structures cannot or should not be modeled on the conventional welfare state. Some see a key role, at the international level, for “virtual states” of minimal geographic or political-military scale that nevertheless serve as important connectors and that disseminate ideas.⁶ Others would favor governing structures that lighten the fiscal burden of government, while stressing individual rights in preference to universal social mandates.⁷

Meeting the challenges of governance naturally involves responses at multiple levels of social interaction, with significant changes in organizational design quite plausible in the future. Problems of global environment, and related matters of transportation and energy efficiency, have classically been addressed at the national and international levels, but progress in solving such problems has been slow. Cities, as political analyst Benjamin Barber and others have suggested, might be more effective than nations in tackling issues of this nature, since they tend to be more focused on everyday concerns and typically deal with less challenging interest-group configurations.⁸ Indeed, the C-40 global group of mayors has already begun to address such pressing, albeit mundane, global environmental challenges with some success, while the Conference of the Parties (COP) series of national dialogues have made frustratingly meager concrete progress.

In a world of conspicuous institutional failure, one entity that still offers some important lessons for the practice of governance is Singapore. It stands strategically at the cusp of two levels of governance—each with distinctive capabilities in the volatile, increasingly global world now emerging. It is a nation-state—one of 193 members of the United Nations. This standing gives it the legitimacy, autonomy, and resources to act authoritatively and flexibly on the global scene. Singapore is also, however, a single, cohesive urban community—a diminutive unit, from a global perspective, of less than 6 million people inhabiting a physical space less than four times the size of Washington, D.C. Although Singapore is tiny from a national perspective, it is obviously much more substantial from a municipal standpoint. It joins the more than 1,000 cities worldwide having a population in excess of 500,000, which together house over one-third of the world’s people and whose number is expected to rise to near 1,400 by the year 2030.⁹

Singapore thus has two dimensions: as a city, and as a state. Both are a source of strength on the international scene and allow Singapore to enjoy the best of both the national and municipal worlds. On one hand, its diminutive city-state character facilitates the pragmatic, flexible, nonideological domestic politics typical of cities that Barber describes. On the other hand, its national standing provides the legitimacy and resources required to play credibly on the international scene in areas of its clear competence.

Singapore’s dual character is also a compelling reason for its importance as a global paradigm. In its capacity as a “smart city,” Singapore is a veritable laboratory for global solutions—especially those bringing informatics to bear. It has devised methods, capitalizing on the enormous potential of digital technology, to meet the pressing challenges of urban transition, in their multifaceted energy, environmental, sanitary, and transport-related dimensions. At the national level, the efforts of Singapore’s “smart state” to provide enabling, economical alternatives to traditional Western entitlement programs in the health and welfare areas as societies grow older—once again with a technological twist—deserve broader consideration as well.

Singapore as Number One?

More than 35 years ago, Harvard scholar Ezra Vogel examined the organizational capabilities of an emerging industrial nation in Japan as Number One.¹⁰ For the manufacturing world of which he wrote, the organizational features that he stressed were plausible strengths on the global stage, even if Japan in the long run could not easily sustain them. Despite Japan’s faults, its distinctive organizational forms did provide lessons, as Vogel suggested, for an America whose own industrial base was steadily crumbling at the time.

We live in a very different and more cosmopolitan world today. Manufacturing is less salient, and services are more central to the livelihood of advanced industrial nations. Societies are more interdependent economically, and increasingly capable of learning from one another through the power of advanced telecommunications, including the Internet. For the more fluid, more global, and less manufacturing-oriented world now emerging, clearly a paradigm transcending the Japanese successes of an earlier age is now needed.

Policy borrowing from state-of-the-art practice around the world is becoming ever more possible and important. And as the world approaches the mid-21st century, performance in the services is central to success. These realities are leading global affairs toward a fresh and paradoxical paradigm, in which the small and vulnerable inform the great: potentially Singapore as Number One. Singapore is simply smart and adaptive—as both a nation and as an urban community—in a volatile global world. The tiny city-state is vulnerable, of course, but that very fragility breeds responsiveness as well.

In recent years, as the world has grown more integrated and global, a proliferation of surveys has ranked the nations of the world on performance indicators: economic achievement, international competitiveness, market orientation, regulatory transparency, avoidance of corruption, and so on. To a remarkable degree, these surveys have placed Singapore at or near the top of the list. And they have done so for sustained periods of time.

The World Bank, for example, has for 10 years in succession (2006 through 2015) considered Singapore the easiest country on earth in which to do business.¹¹ The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report has for 5 years in succession (2011 through 2015) ranked Singapore as second only to Switzerland in overall competitiveness among 148 nations. In both 2014 and 2015 Singapore was first in networked readiness, which measures information and communications technology (ICT) factors. And it was likewise ranked first in meeting the basic requirements for competitiveness.¹² Singapore also traditionally ranks high in transparency of government policymaking (number 1 in 2015); public trust in politicians (also number 1); absence of corruption (number 3); and quality of intellectual protection (number 4).¹³

Singapore does not, of course, rank at the top in everything, in part owing to its distinctive, often controversial, yet efficiency-driven approach to public policy. There are important nuances in its global standing, although it tends to rank remarkably high overall. A sector-by-sector review provides a useful introduction to this unusual city-state, beginning with the most striking element of Singapore’s global profile: its economy, which consistently receives high marks as a global center.

As just mentioned, Singapore is broadly ranked as the easiest place in the world to do business; the average start-up time for a new company, for example, is less than 2.5 days.¹⁴ It is also said to provide strong protection for intellectual property, through a high-quality judicial system, and ranks as having the most open economy worldwide for international trade and investment.¹⁵ Singapore has a strong long-term anticorruption r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Singapore and a World of Change
• 2. The Imperative to Be Smart: Small Country, Few Resources, Volatile Surroundings
• 3. How Singapore Became Smart
• 4. Singapore as Smart State: Minimalist, Enabling Governance
• 5. Singapore as Smart City: Building a Livable, Sustainable Urban Community
• 6. Singapore as Smart Global Hub: Catalyst for Ideas and Action
• 7. Conclusion: Singapore’s Policy Laboratory and the Global Future
• Chronology of Singapore’s Experience
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index