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Singapore is the smallest of […] Asia’s four “Little Dragons” […] but in many ways it is the most successful. Singapore is Asia’s dream country. […] Singapore’s success says a great deal about how a country with virtually no natural resources can create economic advantages with influence far beyond its region. […] But it certainly is an example of an extraordinarily successful small country in a big world
(Naisbitt, 1994, pp. 252, 254).
When Singapore was founded by Stamford Raffles in January 1819, it was a small fishing village inhabited by a thousand Malay fishermen and a few Chinese farmers (Turnbull, 1977, p. 5). Its transformation from a small fishing village in the early nineteenth century to a modern and prosperous city-state today is an incredible story of from rags to riches. Singapore’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita has increased by 56 times from S$1,310 (US$428) in 1960 to S$73,167 (US$52,962) in 2016 (Department of Statistics, 2017, p. 66; 2018). When Singapore was forced to leave the Federation of Malaysia and became independent in August 1965, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was concerned about Singapore’s survival. In his memoirs, Lee (2000) wrote:
We had been asked to leave Malaysia and go our own way with no signposts to our next destination. We faced tremendous odds with an improbable chance of survival. […] On that 9th day of August 1965, I started out with great trepidation on a journey along an unmarked road to an unknown destination
(pp. 19, 25).
Fortunately for Singaporeans, Lee’s fears were unfounded as Singapore has not only survived but has been transformed from a Third World country to a First World country during the past 53 years. The tremendous changes in Singapore’s policy context from 1959 to 2016 are shown in Table I. First, Singapore’s land area has increased by 137.7 km2 from 581.5 km2 in 1959 to 719.2 km2 in 2016 as a result of land reclamation efforts. Second, as a consequence of its liberal immigration policy, Singapore’s population has increased by 3.6 times from 1.58 to 5.61m during the same period. Third, the most phenomenal manifestation of Singapore’s transformation from a poor Third World country to an affluent First World nation during 1960–2016 is that its GDP per capita has increased by 56 times from S$1,310 to S$73,167. Fourth, Singapore’s official foreign reserves have grown by 310 times from S$1,151m in 1963 to S$356,253.9m in 2016.
The lives of Singaporeans have also improved as reflected in the drastic decline in the unemployment rate from 14 per cent to 2.1 per cent during 1959–2016. Furthermore, the proportion of the population living in public housing has also increased from 9 per cent in 1960 to 82 per cent in 2016. Government expenditure on education has also risen by 200 times from S$63.39m in 1959 to S$12,660m in 2016. The heavy investment by the People’s Action Party (PAP) government on education during the past 57 years has reaped dividends as reflected in Singapore’s top ranking among 76 countries on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s study on the provision of comprehensive education (Teng, 2015, p. A1). Finally, as a result of the effectiveness of the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) in enforcing the Prevention of Corruption Act (POCA) impartially, corruption has been minimised in Singapore, which is the least corrupt Asian country according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) in 2016 and 2017.
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