[victorhooi]

When you surprised by Singapore - I assume you mean how low it is?

I may be able to shed some light here - Singapore is considered a "kindly" dictatorship - basically, the ruling party is efficient and has a historical track record of running things well.

Corruption, in the normal sense is near zero.

So the population is happy to keep the status quo.

However, opposition to the ruling party is next to non-existent (or was before, this may have changed), there is little to no freedom of the press (that includes web blogs), and if you try to challenge the government too loudly, they tend to either jail you or file defamation suits against you which they are guaranteed to win, and bankrupt you.

I think it was William Gibson that described Singapore as "Disneyland with the death penalty" (although this was some time ago).