The Logic of the Guardian State: Governance in Singapore's Development Experience

Summary

The role of public policy in development has been an intriguing and often neglected subject of analysis ever since the study of developing economies began at the close of World War II. Perhaps more than anything else, the success of the economies of East Asia in achieving rapid economic growth, often in tandem with activist public policy has forced us to re-examine issues pertaining to the relationship between government, the private sector, and the market. Singapore's economic success, as credited by the World Bank report entitled The East Asian Miracle effectively supports the hypothesis that effective activist public policy is paramount to ensuring effective economic growth.

While arguing that economic policies and policy advice must be country- specific to be effective, this paper does stress that there are important ideas in the Singapore experience that may aid us in our quest to search for indigenous Asian concepts of development. While the special circumstances pertaining to the external international environment, namely an expanding global economy with an increasingly open world trading system and a relatively free transfer of technology between Asia and the West, played an important role in making Singapore's economic policies since 1965 highly effective, this study will focus purely on the domestic dimension of development in an attempt to understand how an ethos of good government in Singapore has evolved and how it is articulated by the ruling élite.

Understanding Governance from the Singapore Perspective

Since the end of the Cold War or as Francis Fukuyama has contended, the End of History, there has been a growing literature in international relations on the “inevitability of democracy”. The impression given is that social pluralism leads to political pluralism and the inevitable domination of culture and values of the industrial societies of the West resulting in some form of assimilation of those values in the developing world. It is certainly true some values which are universal in application are receiving more importance as countries begin to come to grips with the repercussions of economic development and the rapid globalization of international society as a consequence of information technology.