In a current interview with Dwarkesh Patel, Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair mentioned the insurance policies of Lee Kuan Yew—the daddy of recent Singapore. He steered that Lee made three key choices early in his administration, which led to Singapore attaining a excessive degree of financial improvement:
1. Singapore adopted English as its nationwide language.
2. Singapore grew to become 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 greater than typical within the public sector.
This made me consider the similarities between Singapore and firms primarily based in Switzerland. Many firms in Switzerland use English as their official language, even if their nation’s important ethnic teams (German 62.1%, French 22.8%, and Italian 8.0%) all communicate different languages. Singapore additionally has a posh ethnic combine together with Chinese language (75.9%), Malay (15.1%) and Indian (7.4%.)  Blair famous that Lee’s determination 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 greater 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 corporations don’t tolerate corruption, and pay comparatively excessive salaries to prime executives. Lee’s insurance policies relating to corruption and public sector salaries are fairly uncommon within the creating world.
Ethnic strife is a quite common downside in lots of elements of the world. Switzerland has used political decentralization to scale 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 capable of at the 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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