I’m back on campus from a week-long visit to Singapore with the Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce and I can safely say that 65 degrees and low humidity never felt so refreshing. After my long plane ride home and a few days
to recover from jet lag, I’m starting to try and formulate some major takeaways from the trip that might end up being beneficial for our state and our university. Here are three major lessons I gleaned from this visit.
First, Singapore and all of Southeast Asia has become a critical part of the world and our state’s economy. The 10 nations that comprise the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) (of which Singapore is a member) has the 3rd largest population in the world and a GDP of $2.4 trillion. It’s the 5th largest economy in the world and will
likely eclipse the European Union for 4th place by 2050. The state of Washington is the nation’s third largest exporter to ASEAN behind California and Texas, accounting for almost 47,000 jobs in the Evergreen State. Singapore has truly become the Gateway to ASEAN so strengthening economic, cultural and educational ties with this powerful nation-state is clearly in our state’s interest.
Second, Singapore is relentlessly transforming its economy into one based on knowledge and innovation. For a nation with no natural resources to speak of, Singapore realized early on in its history that their economic future would be based on attracting and retaining the best workers in the world. Today, every first world economy is trying to win the “human capital” competition since the nation with the best ideas for new products and industries will be the winners in the 21st century economic sweepstakes.
So how does a nation of less than 6 million people (one third of whom are from Europe, North America and other non-Singaporean nations), compete with the U.S., China and other stronger economies? The answer came from a dinner conversation I had with a U.S. native currently working in Singapore for an autonomous vehicle start-up
called Nutonomy. According to this MIT grad who manages the company’s operations, Singapore went out of their way to both recruit Nutonomy to the country and then bent over backwards to help them establish a base of operations and clear regulatory hurdles to make testing the cars on city streets much easier than the U.S. I heard variations of this same story from other U.S. companies located in Singapore from Microsoft, Expedia, IBM and Tableau – Singapore’s government is a true partner with the business community and goes out of their way to make things easy for them to conduct and expand their business.
Third, Singapore is able to work and speak with a singular voice and focus because there is really only one level of government and one ruling political party in the entire nation. As a city-state, the People’s Action Party has ruled Singapore since its birth more than 50 years ago. There are no states, cities, counties or special district government entities to deal with as we have in the U.S. and the legal system is not used as a way of slowing down or stopping government initiatives. While Singapore is not a complete totalitarian state as their citizens do enjoy some freedoms, dissent is not tolerated and security is very tight. While I’m still convinced American democracy and government is still the envy of the world, the ability of Singapore to execute and coordinate economic growth strategy while simultaneously looking 10-15 years ahead and laying the groundwork now for future success is truly enviable.
Here in Washington and the Puget Sound region in particular, we do plan for the present and the future in a coordinated and thoughtful way. Our political system, however, can oftentimes make following through on these plans clunky at best based on leadership changes resulting from elections or lack of trust among different political jurisdictions. As with any of these delegation visits, time will tell if we can take the best of what we’ve learned and adapt it successfully for our unique Pacific Northwest sensibilities.