From international website http://www.economist.com
How foreigners misunderstand Singapore
The city state’s success offers much to admire but little to
emulate
Excerpt :
SINGAPORE has never been short of admirers. Many leaders of
developing countries respect Lee Kuan Yew, its founding father, for
taking his city-state from third- to first-world status while
resisting Western calls for greater political liberalisation. Paul
Kagame, Rwanda’s iron-fisted president, hopes that his country will
become “the Singapore of Africa”. Fans of Rodrigo Duterte compare
the Philippine president to Lee: strong-willed and intolerant of
crime and corruption.
Lately the rich world, too, has begun to look at the island.
“Want to ditch Obamacare? Let’s copy Singapore’s health-care
miracle,” chirped an opinion piece on the website of Fox News, a
conservative American broadcaster, soon after the election of
Donald Trump. It argued that the “miracle” rested on two features
dear to Republican hearts—“empowering consumers and fostering
competition”. Some of the more vocal Brexiteers dream of turning
Britain into “Singapore-on-Thames”: a low-tax, lightly regulated
haven for businesses eager to trade with Europe. Like the
proverbial blind men describing an elephant by feeling just one
part of the beast, each of these admirers gets something right
about Singapore, but all miss the big picture.
American conservatives, for their part, are right that
Singapore’s health-care system achieves fine results by emphasising
personal responsibility, competition and low public spending.
Singaporeans pay for much of their health care out of their own
pockets and enjoy among the world’s highest life expectancies and
lowest infant-mortality rates. The country spends just 5% of GDP on
health care, of which about 2% of GDP comes from the public purse.
America spends much more, 17% and 8% of GDP respectively, yet its
population is much less healthy.
However, Singapore’s system also features far more coercion and
government intervention than Americans would plausibly accept. Most
hospitals are state-run. Most hospices and nursing homes are
private but government-funded. The government heavily subsidises
acute care. It promotes competition by publishing hospital bills;
American health-care providers, by contrast, make their prices as
opaque as possible to discourage shopping around. The government
compels Singaporeans to divert up to 10.5% of their wages into
“Medisave” accounts (employers contribute, too). It also subsidises
“cost-effective and essential” drugs; unapproved drugs, if
available, can be prohibitively expensive.
Both the left and the right will find much to like about
Singapore’s health-care system. But anyone who thought that
Michelle Obama urging children to eat more apples was too nannyish
will find it hard to stomach. As Kishore Mahbubani of the Lee Kuan
Yew School of Public Policy puts it: “The ideology guiding Lee Kuan
Yew was not Ayn Rand.”
A similar pattern—personal responsibility supported by coercion
and a lean but robust safety net—applies across Singapore’s
economy. More than 90% of Singaporeans own their own homes, but
most are government-built flats bought at government-set prices,
often with government-provided grants. Where Singaporeans can live
depends in part on their ethnicity: to avoid racial ghettos,
Singapore requires the composition of public-housing blocks to
reflect the country’s racial make-up.
Such social engineering would appal Western voters and be struck
down by Western courts. Yet Singaporeans accept it. Paternalism has
enforced racial calm. The country’s Chinese majority has been
spared the atrocities visited on the Chinese diaspora in, say,
Malaysia and Indonesia. More important, the trade-off that Lee Kuan
Yew offered still holds: illiberal politics in exchange for good
government and high living standards.
Singapore’s leaders vigorously defend their reputations with
defamation suits, and gerrymander constituencies to help preserve
the ruling party’s majority. But they deliver safe streets,
first-rate health care, good public transport and a clean,
responsive public administration. In distorted form, elections
allow voters to affect policy: after the ruling party suffered its
worst-ever performance in 2011, winning “just” 60% of the vote, it
took a more populist line and won resoundingly four years
later.
Lee’s bargain is hard to emulate. Both parts have been essential
to Singapore’s success. Yet admirers such as Mr Duterte and Hun
Sen, Cambodia’s strongman, are adept only at the authoritarian bit,
without the clean government or wealth creation. Singapore’s
rich-world admirers, meanwhile, lack the tame politics that allow
Singapore’s rulers to set policy without worrying too much about
the next election—or their citizens’ civil liberties.
http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21722865-city-states-success-offers-much-admire-little-emulate-how-foreigners-misunderstand
