How did Singapore become an insanely rich country despite having pretty much zero resources that it can exploit?
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Their leader for much of late 20th century, Lee Kuan Yew, focused heavily on education, on attracting multinational companies to set up factories there, workers got training, grew skills, more sophisticated manufacturing/industry came in to take advantage of more highly skilled workers, skills complementary to manufacturing like engineering and finance developed internally to support their manufacturing, but eventually Singapore began to attract such industries looking for such workers. Free market / free trade, low taxes also helped draw international trade and finance to Singapore.
They literally became a sort of city-state because nobody (Malaysia, Indonesia) didn’t wanted this poor city as part of their country, and it ended up an economic powerhouse within 40 years.
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