(Taipei, Taiwan)

My brother, who has been living in Vietnam for the past three years, married a Vietnamese lady. According to my mother, married couples in Vietnam have to announce the wedding in the newspapers three months before the marriage. During this period, anyone can write in to oppose the marriage.

I am not sure how such disputes are resolved since no one opposed my brother’s wedding. But I imagine that an opposition would entail someone from the guy or girl’s childhood declaring his or her crush on the prospective bride or groom since age 7 or 6 or 5… Bride or groom then rides off into the sunset with the childhood lover on a scooter.

I also learned about how South American ladies take an interesting approach to fending off unwanted male attention. When guys ask them for a date, it is customary to gush over how excited they are and how they love to go. And you wait and the day comes and ladies never turn up. This is what a political science researcher told us in our qualitative methods class. She was interviewing paramilitaries in Colombia and they would hit on her. Her friends told her that she should just agree to go and never turn up. The guys understand and no one minds it at all…not even when they are murderous paramilitaries.

(APEC CEO Summit, Singapore) Me meeting the Prime Minister of Singapore regarding the paper I wrote for APEC - photo courtesy of APEC

Me: [Told Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong about my time studying and doing research in China]
PM: Ahhh….Your Chinese must be really good now
Me: I don’t know about good, but I would say its improving
Both of us: *Laughs*

(Grindelwald, Switzerland)

I will be heading to Singapore next week for the APEC CEOs Summit, where I am scheduled to meet Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong, President of Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yudhyono and APEC Ambassador Michael Tay. I read Michel Tay’s profile and found it fascinating.

Ambassador Tay served as Singapore’s ambassador to Russia and South Korea. During his stay in Russia, he commissioned a symphony whose title turned out to be “Singapore: A Geopolitical Utopia.” I wonder if he would be interested in the North Korea-Singapore academic exchanges I am working on. After all, the DPRK orchestra by all accounts is pretty good and he could always commission a symphony from them entitled “Singapore: A Geopolitical Utopia Only Slightly Less Utopic than DPRK.”

(Singapore City, Singapore)

I recently received an award from APEC for my paper and will be flying to Singapore to attend the APEC CEO Summit to hobnob with the likes of President Barack Obama and Hu Jintao – that is if their security detail does not keep everyone out of shoe-throwing distance.

I am also scheduled to meet Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and I hope I have the opportunity to raise issues of rising income inequality in Singapore, migrant worker treatment, and the displacement of locals by foreigners in the workforce. Of course, this meeting could very well just turn out to be a public relations opportunity instead of a sincere dialogue. But it is worth a shot

Issued by the APEC Secretariat

Student to attend APEC CEO Summit and meet Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong

Singapore, 12 October 2009

What can APEC do for business? After an arduous process in which business students from across the APEC region submitted responses in essay form, a winner has been selected to attend the prestigious APEC CEO Summit and to meet Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong.

Oikono, Singaporean and currently studying state-owned enterprises in China at Yale University in the United States drew inspiration from the Boeing Dreamliner project:

My Abstract:

The Boeing Dreamliner project is remarkable not just for its amazing product, or its interminable delays, but also for the unprecedented global production network it has brought together. Boeing chose to rely on suppliers from all around the world not just for the delivery of selected parts, but also for research and development collaboration and the production of entire subsystems of the plane.

This network provides a glimpse of the global cluster: a futuristic approach to production that links producers from all over the world to produce much more efficiently than ever before and to produce things that could not be produced before. If the global cluster becomes a reality, this new production system will provide an enormous boost to trade, economic collaboration and technological collaboration between economies. This is why APEC must care about this transition in production systems, promote it, and make Asia-Pacific the most competitive host for it.

However, delays in Dreamliner production reveal problems with the global cluster. The global cluster is made possible by innovations in communication and decreasing ‘institutional distance’ between economies. As the institutional environment in different economies become more similar, inter-economy collaboration becomes easier. However, evidence points towards increasing differences between institutional environments (which business academics term ‘institutional distance’) throughout this decade.

APEC, by viewing its ‘Three Pillars’ mission through the lens of global clusters, can effectively aid the transition in production systems. APEC can overcome the key obstacle of increasing institutional distance by leveraging its unique network of state and private actors to identify key institutional distances to close and to persuade relevant actors to take action.

I am eternally grateful to Prof. Stephen J. Kobrin whose research at Wharton inspired this paper.

(Taipei)

I read Takchek and L’oiseau rebelle posts on Chinese language studies in Singapore. They reminded me of my personal experiences with the language. L’oiseau rebelle ‘s thoughts reflect mine in particular. I believe that the way Chinese is taught in Singapore fails to do justice to the language and fails to motivate students. Note that I refer to Chinese Language education in my time (5-6 years back) and things might have changed since. Also, I went to a neighborhood school. People in other schools might have different experiences.

Background: My family converses in English (Singlish) and Hokkien. Both parents have a minimal command of Putonghua (mandarin). I struggled with Chinese throughout my secondary school and junior college (i.e. middle and high school) life. I remember being one of four people in my junior college who failed Chinese language at the AO Level examinations. Eventually, I managed to pull through and barely passed the exam.

Fast forward to today. After three years in the US, my interest and ability in the language bloomed. I spent my first summer in university working in China on a research project and subsequently spent six months after graduation studying classical and modern Chinese. This year, I gave my first academic presentation in Chinese. While I am not yet at the level of native fluency, I consider myself relatively capable with the language. My interest propelled me to study East Asian Studies at the graduate level.

What happened in between? For me, the biggest transformation was in realizing that China is changing and language is the window into these changes. I was euphoric when I debated political reforms in China with Beijing University professors. I was intensely satisfied when I could discuss media liberalization with Chinese students. When I was in China, I realized that Chinese society was changing and the language both reflected that and allowed me to understand and interact with those changes.

So what is wrong with how Chinese was taught? There was too much focus on memorization, at the expense of discussions. Too much ancient (and sterilized) materials were emphasized, at the expense of contemporary issues. Why not pair banal stories of Yue Fei with materials on modern Chinese nationalism? Why not talk about Li Bai in the larger scheme of how Chinese poetry evolved? Language training in my school was divorced from the deeper discussions of Chinese culture, politics and society that could have motivated me.

I wonder how Chinese can be taught in other ways that would excite students, and whether this failure has roots in the examination structure of Singapore. Or perhaps it’s a resource problem: too many students sharing too few teachers mean fewer discussions and more memorization…

Singapore reminds me more of Sparta everyday. A small wealthy and powerful elite living on the backs of the many poorer migrants. Some of these migrants get a better life, but most also suffer a lot of discrimination in the process.

I stumbled upon this blog (http://taxidiary.blogspot.com/) by a former PhD researcher turned taxi-driver. Reading the stories in there, I wonder if anything can be done for the many poor migrant workers to Singapore who are exploited by the system. They have little recourse to the legal systems, the government or to the social or financial resources Singaporeans or expatriates have. And yet they contribute so much to Singapore’s society.

Erratum: I am not referring to the taxi-driver but to the stories of migrants he encounters in his taxi-ing. That said, I think his situation deserves pity too.
——————————

The entry below from the blog reminds me of many friends I have. It is sad but true. I can even see some of the same personalities at the very conference I am attending now. I wonder what the world would be like if people had more empathy. Sadly, the reasons why most foreigners like Singapore are frequently the very reasons why I feel such antipathy towards it.

Late evening, around 9:30pm, three men, two Caucasians and one Singaporean Chinese, boarded my taxi on Shenton Way outside a nightclub. They came from a drinking party and were heading for another one in a hotel in Chinatown. Well dressed in business attire, they were all in their early thirties and carried an aura of superiority and self-satisfaction, typical of young and smart professionals currently on their way up the career ladders. Life had treated them well.

The Singaporean guy, probably the youngest and surely the shortest among them, was in the middle of his speech when they got into the car. “…200 ringgits a bottle, you know, that’s cheap. The girls, 70 ringgits an hour. That’s what, 30 sing. Right? You can have them for the whole night if you like, also very cheap….”

“Sounds like KL is a great place to party,” said the white man sitting beside me with a half-empty Heineken bottle in his hand, nodding in recognition.

The animated Singaporean was unfinished. “But it is the Singapore girls that’s the best. There’s just no comparison….”

“Yeah, but they are not cheap.” The white men at the back interrupted. “Singapore girls are fantastic but expensive.”

After some debate on Singapore girls, their interests became focused on a lady who was among the people they mingled with earlier in the pub. They all agreed that the woman was the hottest babe in the club tonight. Their multi-angled analyses of the woman were sophisticated and rigorous enough to earn my respect for their ability to make acute and penetrating observations, a valuable skill in any profession. Before the hormonal fire inside of them could blaze any further, however, the Singaporean man dumped cold water on it by saying that the lady was a friend of a friend, and was already married. That brought to conclusion both their short-lived fantasies and the trip itself.

The meter displayed a fare of $5 something and they gave me $6 while working their way out. I said, “wait a minute, there is an extra $3 surcharge.”

The Singaporean looked at me with the straightest face and widest eyes he could possibly make, and said, “what surcharge? Why it’s not shown on your meter?”

“Sorry about that,” I cursed silently before answering. “The meter is an old type but I can give you a receipt with the surcharge on it.”

“Forget it,” the men responded in unison. “We are not going to pay anything that’s not on the meter.” With that, they stepped out of the car.

“Hey guys,” I employed the best knowledge of diplomacy I had this time. “You can’t do this to me. Try to be fair, will you?”

The Heineken guy came back in and said to me, “I live here so I know what you said is correct. But if I were a tourist, I would just tell you to fxxk off. Know what I mean?”

I stared at him, in a way a cobra stares at a mongoose. Privately, however, I was unsure what to do. To escalate the issue, or to let it go, that was the question. At this moment, the Singaporean guy who was now standing on the stairs at the hotel’s entrance, called out loudly, “come on, xxxxx. Hurry up. Just ignore him.”

Before I blinked my eyes, the young white professional promptly cooled down the air between us. “Look, you are a nice man. I am not actually trying to offend you. I meant if I were… Never mind, here is your three dollars. But you should go back to your company and tell them to fix the meter. That’s a very good piece of advice for you, boss.”

“Well, thanks.” I looked down and took the money. “But I can’t even remember how many times I…”

My voice trailed off. The man went out and shut the door before I could finish my sentence.

“…have told them.”

(Favela in Sao Paolo, Brazil) Will Singapore’s income inequality reach South American standards someday?

It has been another two years away from Singapore. One sunny afternoon, I stopped by the Redhill Hawker Center for lunch. Two pretty Chinese ladies walk up to the table of hawkers sitting next to me. The hawkers were giving catcalls to the ladies. One of the ladies gets a hawker to buy her a meal. Walking back, she promises to introduce the hawker to a lady of the night. Talking to friends, this fascinating phenomenon seems to have been around for some time. A friend claims that sex workers from China are able to obtain visas legally since 2007. Unofficially, they have been around longer. But what I want to talk about isn’t sex (sorry to disappoint) but rather, foreigners in Singapore.

I knew it was a sign of the times when my aunt married a rich Belgian (and retired as a lady of leisure) and my brother married a Vietnamese. While travelling in China, every other Chinese I encountered seemed able to tell me that someone they know working is in Singapore. My barber in Beijing had a cousin working in a hotel here; the guy who gave me a lift in northeast China had a friend working here; the kebab guy in Dandong knew someone who is a sex worker here. When I was in South America last December, I met quite a few retrenched bankers. Some of them were planning to come to Singapore to look for jobs.

Regardless of where they come from, Singapore’s foreign crowd has gotten way bigger. The government talks about squeezing 7.8 million people on this island. How are they going to do this? [Hint: I doubt it is going to be Singapore’s low birth rate doing the job.] The foreign population has become truly obvious since I left. I spent a Friday night at Clark Quay and as I made my way back to the MRT station, I realized that everyone around me appears to be Caucasian. On some buses, I suddenly realized that the mainland Chinese accent was all around me. And that’s not to forget the Thais, Filipinos and Vietnamese.

I don’t really know what to make of this demographic change. Sometime back, I wrote about an article on income inequality in Singapore called “the Hawker and the Banker.” It struck a chord with many Singaporeans. But I now suspect that the income inequality and rising costs might have roots in our foreign resident policy. One group of workers comes from developing countries. They work in low wage jobs, live in dormitories and eat in hawker centers. The other group comes from developed countries – largely Caucasian with a sprinkling of wealthy Chinese, Indonesian, Korean or Japanese. They get salaries that are multiples of what local graduates get, live in service apartments or condominiums, and hangout in Clark Quay or the city. And never the twain shall meet.

The setting of this picture is the city-state of Singapore. And sitting in the backdrop, the question for Singaporeans must be: what do we make of this? Economically, I believe local graduate salary failed to keep pace with inflation (especially in the city area). The money brought in by the rich expatriate crowd goes into housing, entertainment and fine dining. What do new graduates feel about entertainment and housing costs soaring above their means? If I once winced at eating at Crystal Jade, I now shudder at the thought. In turn, this system requires the poor foreign worker segment, without which the average Singaporean might find Singapore quite unaffordable rather quickly.

And what does all this mean for the Singaporean identity? We asked ourselves this a long time ago, but this question is all the more urgent today. When I read former Prime Minister Goh’s comments on the urgent tasks facing Singaporeans, I wonder if our leaders are out of touch. Does his list of questions resonate with your concerns? What does all this mean for social stability? Will widening income inequality and resentment towards a rich foreign crowd make Singapore a Xinjiang? Sounds ridiculous but just mention the stereotyped rich White man and his Singaporean girlfriend to the average Singaporean male and you can see how resentment roils under the surface…

Note: A college schoolmate from India working at a non-profit here stays at a dormitory with other developing country foreign workers. He will contribute an article here at Oikono eventually to document their story.

(Hualien, Taiwan)

While most people are familiar with the miracle of Taiwan’s rapid economic growth, fewer are aware of how Taiwan achieved this growth while maintaining low income inequality. Professor Chuang Yi Chyi from the economics department at Chengchi University attributed this largely to land redistribution by the KMT in the 40s and 50s. He also cited how Taiwan’s dependence on labor intensive industries and small and medium enterprises (SME) played a part.

(Hsinchu, Taiwan)

What caught my attention was a chart comparing income inequality with selected countries – including Singapore’s. Singapore’s income inequality (as measured using a deciles system) shows Singapore’s income inequality skyrocketing over the past eight years.* I do not know how such drastic changes in income distribution could have come about in Singapore over such a short period. My guess is that instead of a change in income levels between the pre-2001 top fifth and bottom fifth, Singapore might have experienced an influx of wealthy immigrants.

Another interesting point by the Prof. Chuang was how Taiwan tries to overcome the lack of R&D by SMEs through a national technology agency to promote technology transfer and development. His view is that the tradeoff between a Korean model (big firms with massive R&D) and Taiwanese model is that the lower R&D investment in Taiwan comes with faster commercialization and diffused innovation as technology flows rapidly between the many of firms populating the island.

*The measure, compiled by the Taiwanese government, compared the income of the top fifth against the bottom fifth in some Asian countries including Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. While all of them trended upwards towards more inequality, in Singapore, the change was drastic.

**Also check out my “Taiwan Food to DIE for List”

(Rio De Janiero, Brazil) Apprehensively optimistic?

Two years ago, I was in Hong Kong attending a Wharton Alumni Conference. I was working on a research paper on Chinese Corporate Responsibility (since published in the Journal of Business Ethics). Amidst the (sadly) bland discussions, I remembered a particularly memorable speech by the CEO of BHP Billiton, a global mining giant. The backdrop to this discussion was unprecedented economic growth worldwide, days sorely missed today, leading to commodity price inflation.

The CEO, Mr. Charles “Chip” Goodyear, delivered his views on how the Chinese housing bubble was driving up copper prices with humor. He lamented about his industry’s ability to attract talent. His children never understood his job, and they would tell their teacher that their dad’s job was to watch television all day. He added that one of them wanted to be a doctor and the other a lawyer, and naturally he had to punish the one who wanted to be a lawyer. He exhorted Wharton students among the crowd to consider the mining industry, a blasphemous thought for a school culture dedicated to finance and consulting.

Piqued by the content and the delivery of his talk, I went on stage after he finished and asked him if he could help me with my research. How would I have realized that two years later, this person would become the CEO of Temasek? I was surprised to see his name printed next to Ho Ching’s and Temasek this week in the Financial Times. I hope and believe that his financial acumen is as accurate as he is affable, and that he will see my family’s savings, and Singapore’s savings, through these difficult times. Mr. Goodyear offered to help me with my research, and although I never ended up using it, it makes me glad to see him become the next CEO of Temasek.

(Seoul, South Korea) What attracts global talent?

One facet of Singapore’s economic strategy is to attract bright global talent to live in Singapore, creating a resource-pool that attracts companies. These are the people who have the option to work in Hong Kong, New York, London, San Francisco, or any city of their choice. I have met some of such people who chose to move to Singapore. Singapore appeals to them because it has the allure of Asia but the comfort of a familiar language and institutions. It is this “Asia-lite” factor that draws them. Singapore should emphasize this factor as a competitive advantage. I use “global talent” instead of “foreign talent” in my analysis for the most part to emphasize how this talented pool can be comprised of Singaporeans or foreigners.

A schoolmate of mine, born in East Europe, chose to move to Singapore. A brilliant student, she worked in London over the summer and has an offer to return to her employer there. As someone who does not speak an Asian language and has never been to Asia, Singapore offers a good opportunity to explore a different world. The combination of English as the lingua franca and the exoticism of Southeast Asia attract her. At the end of her summer, she had her employer to transfer her to Singapore.

Last week, I talked to the CEO of Infosys, Gopalakrishnan, and we discussed Infosys’s attempt to attract foreigners to work in India. He suggested that the familiarity of the institutions left behind by the British was a major factor in their success with attracting foreign workers. During my first time working in China, I had to overcome cultural hurdles in my daily interactions and realized how important a familiar working culture is to being productive and happy. Singapore provides foreigners with the comfort of familiar institutions and work culture, easing the transition process for those coming to Asia.

This “Asia-lite” factor, the combination of differences and similarities, is a unique selling point. While good infrastructure, favorable tax benefits and a safe living environment definitely aid in attracting global talent, they do not constitute a sustainable competitive advantage as they are replicable. Cities can enhance their hard infrastructure more easily than their soft infrastructure. Beijing, Hong Kong, London…etc. all did it.

(Havana, Cuba) Finding comfort…

In discussing global talent, the foreign versus local talent debate has to be addressed. This issue inevitably draws rancor from the local population. I believe the problem is not so much “foreign talent” moving to Singapore, but the benefits that are lavished on them to attract them here. The following issues have to be addressed in devising a “foreign talent” policy:

1. If Singapore believes that foreign talent being in Singapore has spillover effects that benefit Singaporeans, these effects should be quantified to determine the economically optimal level of subsidies needed to attract the appropriate level of such talent.

2. Singapore needs to be more discriminating in separating top-tier global talent from middle-tier global talent. The former is a scarce resource that Singapore (and any country) lacks and which provides spillover benefits to local Singaporeans. The latter is human resource that can be developed in Singapore. Bringing in the latter simply increases competition for locals who can fill the job, thus depressing their wages. I suspect that the policy to educate students from China and India in Singaporean universities is too focused on the latter group.

3. If Singapore can develop a unique selling point vis-à-vis competitor cites (i.e. Asia-lite brand or something else), we need not worry about pt. 1. If Singapore is unique in a way that appeals to “foreign talent,” we should be able to attract them without providing lavish benefits. Instead, we can even make them pay for the privilege of living in Singapore. Urban economics shows that people are willing to pay for the higher costs of living in certain US cities (vis-à-vis suburbs) because of attractive consumption and production agglomeration economies (think of this as the “X-factor” of the city).