How did Singapore become an insanely rich country despite having pretty much zero resources that it can exploit?
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One thing I’m not seeing called out in the comments yet: urbanized trade-centric global cities are wealthy in general. Singapore is rich as a “nation” in that it’s a wealthy sovereign city-state without any rural land to have to upkeep.
The Londons, the Tokyos, the New Yorks, the LAs, the Seouls, the Shanghais of the world in turn help financially to support the lesser populated rural areas.
Sure fertile land can help you grow an excess of food to sell, but where’s the real money? Controlling the marketplace itself where *all* of said food (or oil or minerals or….) in the region changes hands. [London is basically 1/4th of the UK’s entire GDP.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_London) [Seoul and the surrounding region (Gyeonggi-do) are almost half of South Korea’s GDP.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyeonggi_Province) Which makes Singapore having a GDP the size of the nation (Malaysia) it once belonged to, actually pretty normal.
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