http://www.okusi.net/garydean/works/fdising.html
In effect, the Singaporean government's policies hoped to attract
TNCs to establish manufacturing facilities in Singapore to not only
provide employment, but also with the hope that sophisticated
foreign technology would 'trickle down' to local companies
effecting technology transfer. Government policy-makers tended to
believe that TNCs were better vehicles for the acquisition of high
technology.[6] However, to what extent this trickle-down effect
actually happened is debatable. It is suggested that TNCs are
generally reluctant to use local contractors, which is where
transmission of techniques and practices would be expected to take
place, and that the technology actually used in locations such as
Singapore is not cutting edge, but rather at the end of its product
life-cycle.[7]
However, one important weakness in Singapore's approach is the
question of technological innovation, considered the last stage of
technology transfer.[10] For a variety of reasons, state-of-the-art
R&D by TNCs is nearly always concentrated in a few developed
countries, and high technology tends not to be developed outside
the TNC's home-base. Cutting-edge R&D in particular is usually
undertaken close to management and decision-making centres where
there exists a large local market, and a pool of advanced and
specialist technical skills.[11] Another important weakness is that
the very presence of strong TNCs can inhibit local companies from
deepening their technological capabilities, preferring to import
foreign technologies that are proven and ready-to-use, rather than
invest in their own R&D.[12] This is arguably what has already
happened in Singapore as a consequence of their developmental
path.
and of course
With or without FDI, Singapore would have found it difficult to
languish as an economic backwater. Accidents of location, culture
and history came together in Singapore, and given a modicum of
political stability, such a country could only prosper. Singapore
was lucky; its apparent 'success' was certainly not only due to its
FDI policies, but also due to many other factors.
What FDI has done for Singapore is to assist in the creation of a
nation with one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, for
what that is worth. Singapore could be said to be wealthy in the
same way that ancient Athens was said to be democratic. In both
cases, a huge, anonymous underclass of cheap labour supported the
superstructure; in the case of Singapore, Malaysians (of every
race, not just Malays) and other Southeast Asians, who are offered
only the barest of legislative protection by the government.
The cost in human terms of this success has been high:
Singapore today is an authoritarian corporatist state that
intervenes in virtually every aspect of citizen's lives. Singapore
has become a nation of functionaries who serve the interests of the
TNCs and the Singaporean state elite. Within such an environment
there exists very little true entrepreneurship. FDI has not
assisted in the development of an innovative population; rather it
has assisted in the creation of a self-satisfied, arrogant society
that seems content to live off its natural advantages.[23]
Singapore today resembles an enormous air-conditioned shopping
mall, with squeaky-clean streets and traffic so orderly as to
border on the bizarre.
