Kong Chong Ho

Industrial Restructuring, the Singapore City-State, and the Regional Division of Labour

With continuous economic growth in the 1970s and 1980s and increasing overseas competition, Singapore, as a small city-state with an open economy, faces perhaps the greatest challenge among the Asian newly industrialised economies in their attempts to maintain the pace of development. The effects of a chronic labour-supply situation and the appreciating Singapore dollar on the export competitiveness of the manufacturing sector are reviewed. Enterprise and state responses to these mounting pressures are examined, particularly with regard to the labour shortage. One optimistic long-term solution seems to lie in regional cooperation in industrial development, with a sectoral and technical division across Singapore, Johor in Malaysia, and the Riau Islands of Indonesia. With the three regions in different stages of development, the regional development plan is to bring about a division on the basis of the relative availability of land, labour, and infrastructure. In the second half of the paper, the Singapore—Johor link, the most developed side of the growth triangle is examined, and the potential and problems arising from this arrangement are explored.

Asia.com: Asia encounters the internet

1. Asia Encounters the Internet Part 1 Perspectives and Critical Orientations 2. The State of Internet Use in Asia 3. Catching Up and Falling Behind: Inequality, IT and the Asian diaspora 4. Cyberspace, Surveillance and Social Control: The hidden face of the Internet in Asia 5. Global Technology Meets Local Environment: State attempts to control Internet content 6. Piracy, Open Source and International Intellectual Property Law Part 2 Issues and Impacts: Case studies 7. From Real to Virtual (and back again): Civil society, public sphere, and the Internet In Indonesia 8. MalaysiaKini.com and its Impact on Journalism and Politics in Malaysia 9. Who is Setting the Chinese Agenda? The Impact of Online Chatrooms on Party Presses in China 10. Clicking for Votes: Assessing Japanese political campaigns on the web 11. The Tamil Diaspora, Tamil Militancy and the Internet 12. Construction and Performance of Virtual Identity in the Chinese Internet 13. Opening a Pandoras Box: The cyber-activism of Japanese women 14. Support and Spewing: Everyday activities of Hindu online groups 15. Communication and Relationships in Online and Offline Worlds: A study of Singapore youths

Industrial Restructuring and the Dynamics of City-State Adjustments

This paper directs attention to the rapid industrial changes experienced by the city-state in the past thirty years and the problems associated with a maturing economy. To provide a deeper understanding of the adjustment process, the analysis is done within the context of firm, state, and labour interactions. The analysis indicates that with land and labour resources becoming fully utilised, the city-state adjusts to the requirements of international capital by increasing the regional, technical, and sectoral division of labour.

The Neighbourhood in the Creative Economy: Policy, Practice and Place in Singapore

This paper examines the wild and unruly side of the creative economy and how work-styles associated with this form of production are closely tied to particular types of urban environment. In the case of Singapore, the policy to grow creative industry as a key competitive strategy has focused on building infrastructure, manpower and alliances without space provision for a range of activities. State policies, especially in the education of creative workers and artists, are broad in their impacts and these tend to have unanticipated effects in growing a wider array of activities than imagined. As a result, new start-ups take root in ungentrified portions of Singapores inner city where low rents and centrality provide the functional basis for growth, but equally important, the diversity and vitality create an atmosphere which fits the work-styles of new economy firms.

Corporate regional functions in Asia Pacific

Drawing on managerial interview material from a multi- industry sample, this paper sketches the locational dynamics of regional functions in the Asia Pacific. Generic factors like proximity to company affiliates and market access are discussed, along with industry specific dynamics for air delivery and online information services. The paper ends with an analysis of the inertia created by agglomeration effects of established places versus the competing pulls of new markets and production sites.

Singapore: Building a Knowledge and Education Hub

Rapid economic development in Botswana has come with lagging educational capacity and gaps in the professional skills needed for a more diversified economy and a role in the global knowledge economy. Consequently, as part of a policy to diversify into a number of market niches where Botswana has competitive advantages, the government sought to develop the country as an education hub. It considered and rejected an expensive special-purpose facility to build an elite campus cluster and instead sought to build Botswana as a country-level education hub. The education hub strategy aims to modernize the education sector, build domestic capacity, reduce the dependence and costs of overseas placements, internationalize the outlook of students and the workforce, and attract international students, branch campuses, and investment.

Competing to be Regional Centres: A Multi-agency, Multi-locational Perspective

This paper recognises that the economic fabric of cities has to be considered as a dynamic outcome of aggregate outcomes of decisions by different agents made with reference to other competing locations. Drawing on interview material from a multi-industry and multi-city sample as well as company listings compiled in three countries, this paper illustrates the location dynamics of regional functions of multinational companies and the consequences these investments have on cities. The strategic actions by these firms to match activity to place attributes are examined in relation to efforts by governments to attract regional functions.

Education and human capital management in a world city: the case of Singapore

There is considerable evidence to suggest that the human capital needs of the world city differ from what Robinson calls “ordinary cities” or what Markusen and associates term as “second tier cities”. This path is blazed most notably in the field of world cities and the flow of skilled labour, in the work by Sassen and with case examples (finance, law, accountancy) provided in the work by Beaverstock and his associates. This focuses on producer services and migration flows needs to be matched by an accompanying look at city-based strategies. This paper represents an attempt to provide this by providing a case history analysis of Singapore in three stages of growth – as port city, industrial city and as world city – in order to show how the evolving infrastructure associated with human capital (education, immigration and labour policies) allows human capital to be developed, attracted, harnessed, deployed, released and retained.

Attracting and Retaining Investments in Uncertain Times: Singapore in South-east Asia

This paper takes a political economy approach in evaluating the states role in investment promotion. Using the Asian financial crisis as an opportunity to study regulatory mechanisms, the paper examines both state-society relations as well as relations between Singapore and its neighbours, Indonesia and Malaysia. The difficult policies which Singapore enacted during the crisis-namely, a wage-cut as well as the drive to recruit foreign skilled labour in the midst of a depressed economy—cannot be understood except in terms of an institutional context involving agencies, interest-groups and segments of society and the states continuing ideological work and, specifically, within an embedded autonomy position where the state was able to fend off lobbying efforts while at the same time using its position with the unions to push for wage-cuts and skilled foreign labour. Such embedding or nestedness was also apparent in Singapores regional relations. The incorporation of the Riau islands in Indonesia in sub-regional production networks managed by Singapore led to consistent stances taken by Singapore and Indonesian regional authorities to protect investments, in the midst of inconsistent signals between the national governments of the two countries.

The Global Schoolhouse: Governing Singapore’s Knowledge Economy Aspirations

Singapore ’s goal to re-build itself into an innovation-driven economy with world-class capabilities has opened new opportunities and challenges for its universities. This chapter analyses the Global Schoolhouse, a key education policy platform that aims to transform Singapore into a “knowledge-based economy”. Two Global Schoolhouse initiatives are examined—the alliance between Singapore and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and the institutional restructuring aimed at re-modelling the National University of Singapore into a “global knowledge enterprise”. More than an effort to re-structure the mission and governance of Singapore ’s universities, the Global Schoolhouse can be read as part of a broader initiative to re-engineer the institution of citizenship, creating tensions between equity and Singapore ’s new brand of meritocracy. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the possibility of new regionalization initiatives for Singapore ’s universities and new avenues for knowledge creation it potentially represents.