Money talks, manufacturing is likely to walk - even in Paradise

'We can chart our course for the benefit of four million Singaporeans, unlike Hong Kong where [the] way to the future is decided by China to advance the overall interests of not only seven million Hong Kongers but also 1,300 million mainlanders.'

Lee Kuan Yew

Singapore Minister Mentor

HOW THE STORY changes. When I travelled to Paradise in my days as an investment analyst and met with government bureaucrats, which means practically everyone in charge of anything in Singapore, there was routinely a quite different spin on the comparison with Hong Kong.

This one held that poor lonely Singapore stood exposed with greedy Malaysia and Indonesia ready to impoverish it by stealing all its industries while Hong Kong benefited from Beijing's maternal loving care and could comfort itself that those 1.3 billion mainlanders would not be allowed to undermine its economy. It was the reasoning normally offered for the Singapore government's insistence on devoting a good deal of its effort and money to maintaining a large manufacturing element in its economy.

'We can't put all our eggs in one basket like you people in Hong Kong can do,' these bureaucrats would say. 'What if we concentrated on services for neighbouring countries like you do and then found Malaysia taking it all back from us? Where would we be then? We have to keep manufacturing too.'

You could say to them, as I routinely did, that the mix of a wealthy city state with only a tiny domestic market, a tiny manufacturing labour pool, high wages, little land area and a strong currency was hardly ideal for a manufacturing centre, but in Paradise they know better.