Its funny how some of my so-called conservative Republican friends like to cite Singapore as a good example of capitalism and free markets. The nice thing about conservative Republicans is they dont read a lot. Most of them get their information the same way people learn the news through gossip over the backyard fence. Singapore is a city state with about 7.5 million citizens. It has negligible natural resources. It is a heavily managed economy and its success was government designed and funded. The same political party has controlled government for a half century. It controls the media, civil service and society. The lynchpin of Singapores success was its concentration on improving public education, particularly university level education. From a speech given by Mr. Lim Chuan Poh, Chairman of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research. For a small country like Singapore, it is actually very challenging to introduce diversity in the university sector. One aspect of this challenge is to persuade the public about the quality of the new institution and their educational programs. A fresh approach was therefore required. We first saw this with SMU, which was designed in collaboration with the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. This partnership brought not just the US style of education to Singapore as an alternative to the British system which Singapore was more accustomed to, it also helped to establish SMU quickly through the reputation of Wharton School. Learning from this experience, we felt that meaningful partnerships with strong, reputable foreign partners were invaluable in giving these new universities and institutions a credible start. SUTD was set up in collaboration with MIT and Zhejiang Universities, while SIT has multiple partners, including Digipen, TUM and Manchester University, each of them, excellent in the programs that they are offering. This reputational assurance amidst increasing diversity is especially evident with medical education in Singapore. Apart from the traditional undergraduate route to medicine at NUS, NUS partnered with Duke University to start the Duke-NUS Graduate medical school, with greater emphasis on clinical research for the graduate students. And recently, we started the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, with yet another alternative training route through NTU’s partnership with Imperial College London. The School just took in their first cohort of 54 students out of 800 applications from top students. What my Republican friends like, of course, is low taxes. Apparently democracy is down the priority list for them. Corporate taxes are capped at 17% and income taxes are capped at 20%. A flat rate of 15% is paid by foreigners on their income plus there is a levy on foreign workers who do not have permanent resident status. There is an across the board 7% sales tax plus various taxes on transportation. There are no capital gains taxes, but there are no capital loss deductions either. Im figuring if Manchester had a 7% sales tax and a graduated income tax capped at 17%, given our already large university population, wed be golden city state too. Ill have to bring this up with my Republican friends and see how they like it. What do you think theyll say?
Posted on: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 20:29:00 +0000
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