Singapore government systems of persuasion: investment
This is an addendum to the previous post. Another way the government of Singapore has to influence the economy is through its more or less direct interference, for all Friedman’s claims that Singapore is a free market. The government has a company, Temasek, which owns a significant percentage of every large commercial concern on the island. This includes the companies that build and run the trains, buses and taxis that keep the place moving, so that, for instance, in an economic downturn, these companies will, out of the goodness of their hearts, reduce fares. Now that the local economy is thriving again, the fares have gone up again.
And there’s also a lot of thoughtful planning going on. Think about clean drinking water; Singapore is one of the few countries in Asia where you can drink what comes out of the tap without boiling it. (Hong Kong is another.) There is a serious water policy here, not only in terms of draining off the torrential monsoon rains so that the island does not revert to swampland, but in terms of water independence. Through rainwater capture, Singapore is cutting down on the amount of water it needs to import from Malaysia (with which country relations are not always 100% amicable). And in running a lot of that water, plus cleaned up sewage, through the state-of-the-art reverse osmosis treatment plants, Singapore gets water that is not only drinkable, but suitable for the biotech and chip industries that it wishes to encourage – the high-end manufacturing Friedman mentions in his article. And incidentally, almost the ONLY manufacturing that happens here these days, as so many manufacturing jobs are outsourced to China.