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 Heading South?
In much of Southeast Asia, economic growth has stalled, freedoms are being rolled back and terrorism is a constant threat |
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Facing Up to China
To compete, Southeast Asia must crank up its domestic economies |
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The Lion In Winter
After years of prosperity, Singapore's economic success formula is failing |
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The Lion In Winter — page 3
Given the island's loss of high-paying jobs in recent years, it is easy to see why some of the country's best-educated citizens are bolting. One way to plug the growing job gap is to lessen dependence on multinationals and government-controlled corporations by getting more Singaporeans to start their own businesses. But as even Singapore's founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, acknowledges, the country's entrepreneurial record is dismal. The city has produced just one world-class entrepreneur: Sim Wong Hoo, founder of Creative Technology, the company that almost single-handedly invented the PC sound card. Singapore is home to other enterprising business ventures, of course, but most are small and contribute relatively little to the economy. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, in contrast, small and medium-sized enterprises generate three-quarters or more of GDP. In Singapore, the figure is about one-fifth.
"The government has created an environment for the individual to be in a comfort zone that doesn't give him the appetite to take risks of any sort," says Alvin Phua, chief executive of Byte Power, an Australian information-technology company that reported $16 million in profits last year. Phua's parents emigrated to Australia when he was 12 in part because they didn't want their three sons to suffer the stifling pressure Singapore's schools pile onto their students. Phua, now 30, believes his success as an entrepreneur would not have been possible had he stayed in Singapore. "The era we are moving into is extremely competitive in nature, and the government can be protective for only so long."
Aware of the need for greater innovation, Singapore's leaders have made some gestures to encourage a can-do spirit. Government-backed loans have been made more available to start-ups, for example, and a Minister for Entrepreneurship has been named. But fundamental reforms—such as selling off parts of the government's stable of companies, which dominate every aspect of the private sector, from telecommunications to banking—have been consigned to the back burner. Singapore's "nanny-state" technocrats recognize that imposing a Silicon Valley-like mind-set on the population through social engineering won't be easy. "We cannot create entrepreneurs," says Lee, Singapore's founding father. "We can only facilitate their emergence."
But when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. For example, Lee himself has suggested stimulating Singaporeans to be more independent by having the government encourage "little Bohemias," neighborhoods where individuals with alternative views and lifestyles gather, cross-pollinate and eventually bring forth a brood of risk takers. The city already has one neighborhood with what passes for a raffish reputation: the former British army officers' living quarters at Portsdown Road, a favorite haunt of artists, musicians and other avant-garde types. It is a sprawling estate of vintage-1950s two-story walk-ups shaded by trees and set among grassy knolls. The area boasts one fashionably shabby meeting place, the ColBar (short for Colonial Bar), which serves English beer and warmed-over meat pies under a corrugated-iron roof and acts as an unofficial meeting vessel for the community. But the ColBar, along with a large chunk of Portsdown Road, is to be bulldozed in a few months to make way for a highway that is part of an ambitious government project tagged with the invented-in-a-cubicle moniker of Fusionopolis. There, according to a local news report, "arts, business and technology will hopefully become bedfellows, and researchers may be able to rub shoulders with moviemakers to create, say, better digital films or cybergames." If there are going to be little Bohemias, it seems they will be government built and supervised.
It's not that the government is opposed to agents of organic change, as represented by the ColBar. In fact, authorities are trying to diversify the island's gene pool so that spontaneous change can occur. Once notoriously picky about whom it allowed into the country to live and work, Singapore has opened the floodgates in recent years through its "foreign-talent" program. Some 70,000 foreign professionals now reside in the city-state, and foreign-born residents make up one-quarter to one-third of the population, a demographic unmatched anywhere except a few rich Gulf emirates.
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