How did Singapore become an insanely rich country despite having pretty much zero resources that it can exploit?
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It’s an important trade hub, historically where ships coming from Europe would stop to trade with ships coming from China and Japan.
If you look at its location on the map, Singapore is located exactly where a ship coming around the tip of India would pass on its way to the Pacific.
There are similar points of geographically bottlenecked trade in Istanbul, Tangier, Cape Town, the UAE… if trade ships have to pass you, you might get rich middle-manning the trade.
It’s an important trade hub, historically where ships coming from Europe would stop to trade with ships coming from China and Japan.
If you look at its location on the map, Singapore is located exactly where a ship coming around the tip of India would pass on its way to the Pacific.
There are similar points of geographically bottlenecked trade in Istanbul, Tangier, Cape Town, the UAE… if trade ships have to pass you, you might get rich middle-manning the trade.
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Laws in singapore are extremely strict, especially when it comes to corruption; there is even a corruption museum there to show how the country has cracked down on it a whole bunch.
This crackdown on corruption has allowed trust in their economic sector from other countries – it is considered “safe” to invest there (safe as in money not getting stolen by govt. officials or govt. market manipulation, etc., not safe as far as gains/returns).
I highly recommend watching episode 8 of This Giant Beast that is our Global Economy w/ Kal Penn (amazon prime, i think). This is the corruption episode, and he does interviews in singapore – how they dont have resources, why they set up their laws, and adjacent info like that 🙂
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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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Laws in singapore are extremely strict, especially when it comes to corruption; there is even a corruption museum there to show how the country has cracked down on it a whole bunch.
This crackdown on corruption has allowed trust in their economic sector from other countries – it is considered “safe” to invest there (safe as in money not getting stolen by govt. officials or govt. market manipulation, etc., not safe as far as gains/returns).
I highly recommend watching episode 8 of This Giant Beast that is our Global Economy w/ Kal Penn (amazon prime, i think). This is the corruption episode, and he does interviews in singapore – how they dont have resources, why they set up their laws, and adjacent info like that 🙂
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.
Laws in singapore are extremely strict, especially when it comes to corruption; there is even a corruption museum there to show how the country has cracked down on it a whole bunch.
This crackdown on corruption has allowed trust in their economic sector from other countries – it is considered “safe” to invest there (safe as in money not getting stolen by govt. officials or govt. market manipulation, etc., not safe as far as gains/returns).
I highly recommend watching episode 8 of This Giant Beast that is our Global Economy w/ Kal Penn (amazon prime, i think). This is the corruption episode, and he does interviews in singapore – how they dont have resources, why they set up their laws, and adjacent info like that 🙂
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