日志
ECVV -- Stayin Alive
| 'Stayin' Alive' |
The key to Singapore’s success is its ability to manage an incented capitalist environment that is also an ‘engineered’ economy. This is a singular model, probably not repeatable anywhere else. But it’s a particularly responsive one in the context of this country. Mr. X cites an example: “When credit cards came to Korea, the people were unfamiliar with them and went nuts. They’d have a dozen cards and the country ran up a staggering consumer debt that posed a serious economic problem. Singapore saw what happened there, didn’t intend to repeat it and so when consumer credit was made available the trade-off was a directive forbidding financial institutions to offer lines of credit secured by real estate.” Net result---a reasonably painless transition to the mass availability of credit cards.
Or take how they handle the problem of automobile congestion---a scurge that is strangling most Asian cities. Singapore is regarded as the most expensive place on earth to own a car. A fixed number of license plates are issued, valid for a ten year period, and you can’t buy a car without one; the price of these plates is set by the market, they are sold off in an auction model and the going price not long ago was $60,000. Then driver’s are taxed whenever they enter the central business district through a kind of E-Z toll card system installed in each car (it costs $3 a day).
It’s this ability to turn on a dime that gives Singapore an edge. But, as Mr. X points out, without such agility the place is at risk. “The whole game here is to stay five to twenty years ahead of mainland China in technology and applications. Singapore can’t compete once China catches up.”
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Singapore depends on its political apparatus to sustain the ability to engineer adept responses when situations change or competitors near. To assure that the best people are, indeed, running the show the leadership is “groomed, trained and tracked” from an early age. Students are sent at government expense to elite universities like Harvard or Oxford and then, if they take a government job afterwards, their debts are cancelled after a half-dozen years. Once they’re in the government, resources are devoted to keeping them there. “Ministers’ salaries are pegged to private sector investment bankers, these days that’s around $600,000” explains Mr. X, “so they can’t be corrupted and they don’t feel stupid working in the public sector.” (He contrasts this to America, where “politicians are morons who are independently wealthy.”)
The dark shadow Mr. X sees looming on the horizon is the ability to pass this rigorous, demanding model on to the next generation. “The older generation cleared out the swamps, much of Singapore is built on reclaimed land. With their kids, having the latest cell phone is the crisis in their lives.”
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To provide some cushion, the country actively makes off-shore investments itself in other Asian countries (Singapore is the leading investor in Vietnam, for example). Much