[adventured]

Their economic production is quite remarkable.

Circa 2001 their GDP per capita was 1/3 lower than Japan, and about 1/5 lower than Hong Kong. They suffered a decade of stagnation from the early 1990s until 2003. They've been on a tear ever since, with GDP per capita now 45% higher than Japan and Hong Kong. Quite a jump in just 13 or 14 years.

Likely within another few years they'll pass Malaysia in GDP, with Malaysia having six times the population.

[seanmcdirmid]

I think with China weakening, it can't continue. We are probably in for a second Asian Financial Crisis in the next few years.

Also, Singapore is very much like Switzerland: they have to import many/most of their workers, except whereas Switzerland focuses on the high end, they focus on both (importing Chinese bus drivers and American programmers). Its a weird mix that isn't sustainable (also, they should stop using cheap construction for everything, concrete shouldn't be used so much in a modern city!).

[adventured]

I agree, China will create an economic blackhole effect in the near future. They've accumulated between $25 trillion and $45 trillion in new debt in the last seven years (depending on which analysts you listen to), and are strictly reliant on trillions in new annual debt at this point to continue their fake GDP growth. Their real estate market is crashing. They have a demographics nightmare looming. The age of robotics replacing low value manual labor has arrived. And to top it off, China has half a billion farmers that are effectively unemployed with no future prospects.

I'd argue they stopped growing in real terms years ago. Most of their added GDP the last five years has been purely low value debt derived 'growth.'

Also, the last time the US Dollar behaved like it is now, it caused a large emerging markets crash, and it's likely that will be repeated again (if to a lesser degree).

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-16/strongly-ri...

The countries that benefited hugely from China's rise, will suffer as China's boom turns into decades of stagnation. That will include Singapore, Australia and much of Asia in general. I think given China is repeating Japan's debt mistakes, and has a similar demographics problem (but much worse given the extreme poverty covering 2/3 of their population), China will at best probably mimic Japan's post 1980s stagnation.

[lucaspiller]

Citation? I visited last year and went to a tech meetup, and other than myself and a German guy who had been living in the area for 20 years, everyone else out of 60 people was Asian.

Quite a few people I spoke to were from China and said they came to the country to study. As I understand they are provided full scholarships if they stay to work for X years after completing their studies.

You are right about lower class workers though - Singapore and Malaysia, like GCC countries, also import a lot of construction workers from India.

[seanmcdirmid]

Plenty of non-rich Mainland Chinese also come to Singapore for work. The ones you meet in tech aren't all of them (likewise, Singapore gets poor/rich workers from India).

At some point, a country should provide social mobility to remain healthy. Switzerland is a great example: they take refuges who many take lower-level jobs, but their children are basically Swiss and move up the ladder quickly. Singapore isn't like that.

[jpatokal]

Switzerland and Singapore aren't actually all that different here, although I'll readily admit Sg is more draconian -- eg. government permission is required for a Work Pass holder to marry a citizen!

But both make it very difficult for "unskilled" people to acquire residence or citizenship. This avoids the need to provide an option for social mobility among the lowest earners by ensuring that they get shipped out to become someone else's problem before they have kids, and some undemanding fresh meat is imported instead, because life as a maid/construction worker in Sg is still more lucrative than toiling in the fields in the Philippines/Bangladesh/etc.

[seanmcdirmid]

Switzerland doesn't import unskilled workers directly, they just get them as refuges that they accept. They do not take them in as short term residents, that would be very unswiss.

(lived in Switzerland for two years)

[_delirium]

The situation's changed post-Schengen, but Switzerland traditionally did have a guest-worker program, focused on short-term and seasonal workers who wouldn't gain any kind of rights. These were mostly from Europe, not refugees from elsewhere (the vast majority from Italy, with smaller numbers from Spain, Turkey, and Portugal). Under pressure, some were subsequently given residence rights, or (for those from EU countries) gained them later as a result of the Schengen treaty. See the section "Post-war labor migration" here: http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/switzerland-faces-com...

[crdb]

I think this is a very Western-POV argument to make. Like the minimum wage argument, it stems from a belief in a fixed pool of resources being abused by robber barons, or a diluted version of the argument, which may be true in some cases. If you dislike Austrian flavored economics, it's probably not a good idea to keep reading. I will leave aside the fact that Singapore was recently targeting to be 50% immigrant in the near future (and, in practice, is still heading there), and focus on the implied criticism of Singaporean labour policy in your comment and others on this thread.

From an Asian or third world POV, Singapore is creating thousands if not millions of jobs that wouldn't otherwise exist. These workers aren't abducted from their countries and shipped in chains to be sold as free labour as used to be the case in another country just a couple centuries ago. They voluntarily seek income and non-monetary benefits such as living in a country with clean roads, a fair justice system, clean water from the tap, ample food, and pay several times what they'd get at home which goes a LOT further when sent back home to the family (source: I lived and worked in India for an Indian company, on a project involving Pralahad's "bottom of the pyramid"; never was I so grateful to be born in the West).

An illustrative example is the market for maids. Although I don't personally have a house maid, plenty of middle class income families here have a full time one because they can afford it (around $500/month + lodging and food I believe is the going rate, although the families I know pay upwards of $2000). Bump the cost of a maid to a Western minimum wage on a PPP adjusted basis, and the locals will start doing their own cooking and cleaning, and the Pinay ladies who get to spend a few years in Singapore won't have that opportunity anymore. Their jobs mostly won't go to Singaporeans, they'll just disappear, just as your illegal Latina maids in the US would disappear if "la Migra" was more thorough.

Singapore is not responsible for the policy failures of other states (indeed a strong argument can be made for Lee Kuan Yew being instrumental to the bettering of policy and prosperity in a lot of much larger states such as his influence on Deng Xiao Ping, and his part in the creation and direction of ASEAN).

As such my personal opinion, however politically incorrect in the Western ivory tower it may be, is starting to lean towards Western policies being the "inhuman" ones - "close the borders and go protectionist on your labour markets" - with a huge opportunity cost in millions of jobs that simply disappear or become illegal (as with the extraordinary 11 million illegal immigrants estimated to live in the US, over 3% of the population!) which aside from sucking more from a worker point of view, is a breach of the rule of law and therefore yet another attack on the primacy of individual rights.

A strong case can be made for the opposite argument: look at Australia for a tightly regulated foreign labour market, with high worker benefits, a comfortable welfare state, and thus a much flatter society which can be argued to be nicer to live in for citizen. It also has millions of people knocking at the door and being turned away (see any discussion about "Big Australia").

And therein lies the uncomfortable part of any immigration discussion: how do you define who gets rights? What is a citizen? Who is part of my "group"? What defines my home and what do I want in it? We Westerners benefit from excellent borders, so we do not need to think too hard about these things.

[BurningFrog]

How specifically is it not sustainable?

There are plenty more foreigners willing to emigrate to a prosperous and safe city state.

[seanmcdirmid]

The rich highly skilled foreigners aren't really escaping poverty back home. The poorly skilled foreigners aren't welcome to stay.