In a latest interview with Dwarkesh Patel, Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair mentioned the insurance policies of Lee Kuan Yew—the daddy of recent Singapore. He urged that Lee made three key selections early in his administration, which led to Singapore attaining a excessive stage of financial growth:
1. Singapore adopted English as its nationwide language.
2. Singapore turned extremely open to overseas capital and expertise.
3. Singapore adopted a zero tolerance coverage for corruption, mixed with salaries for prime authorities officers that had been an order of magnitude larger than typical within the public sector.
This made me consider the similarities between Singapore and companies based mostly in Switzerland. Many companies in Switzerland use English as their official language, even if their nation’s most important ethnic teams (German 62.1%, French 22.8%, and Italian 8.0%) all communicate different languages. Singapore additionally has a fancy ethnic combine together with Chinese language (75.9%), Malay (15.1%) and Indian (7.4%.) Blair famous that Lee’s choice to have Singapore undertake English was fairly controversial on the time.
Switzerland is a extremely open financial system, which welcomes overseas funding. Roughly 30% of Switzerland’s inhabitants is overseas born, far larger than the ten% to twenty% typical in Western Europe. Singapore additionally welcomes overseas expertise and funding, with 37% of its inhabitants overseas born. Once more, Lee’s coverage was controversial on the time, as import substitution was in vogue on the time Singapore was based (in 1965.)
Like Singapore’s authorities, Swiss firms don’t tolerate corruption, and pay comparatively excessive salaries to prime executives. Lee’s insurance policies concerning corruption and public sector salaries are fairly uncommon within the growing world.
Ethnic strife is a quite common drawback in lots of components of the world. Switzerland has used political decentralization to cut back the hazard of battle between areas talking completely different languages. Decentralization wouldn’t be as possible in a small city-state like Singapore, however by adopting English as a language Singapore was in a position to at the very least considerably cut back the salience of ethnicity.
I don’t know if Lee Kuan Yew had Europe’s most profitable nation in thoughts when he adopted these insurance policies, however regardless of the motive, Lee ended up making a Singaporean mannequin that appears uncannily like a profitable Swiss multinational company.
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