The Singaporean passport can enter 192 countries visa free, making it the #1 passport. The passports in 2nd position with 190 countries visa free are Germany’s, Spain’s, and Italy’s, however, those are self explanatory. EU + Schengen + big world powers. What did Singapore do to achieve that?
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Countries with strong passports are pretty much exclusively high-income countries. The logic is that (1) they’re very unlikely to overstay their visas/illegally immigrate because they already live in a desirable country; (2) they’re likely to have enough money to be tourists that contribute to the tourism economy of the country they’re visiting it. So that explains why the EU, UK, Canada, the US, Australia, NZ, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc all have very strong passports.
As for why Singapore specifically is #1, it is politically neutral and doesn’t have a history of colonizing others. For political reasons, some developing countries have a lot of distrust and dislike for European countries, the US, etc. Singapore has never done anything to have that work against them, so they have the visa benefits of being rich without having the visa downsides of political tensions with the Global South.
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