Summary

Business, Government and Labor in the Economic Development of Singapore and Southeast Asia analyzes the inter-linked and evolving roles of private sector business, government public policy, and labor markets in the economic development of Singapore and its Southeast Asian neighborhood. It does this through 16 essays written by Prof. Linda Y C Lim, an early and long-established scholar of these subjects, and published over a 35-year period. For Singapore, often considered the world's most successful economy, the essays highlight the determining role of government's industrial and social policy through to the present day, when the growth model of the past faces many external market and domestic resource constraints. In the rest of Southeast Asia, in contrast, the essays explore how private sector business, dominated by the locally-domiciled ethnic Chinese minority, thrived and drove economic growth in underdeveloped markets with imperfect institutions, and consider if and how this might change with China's increasing presence in the regional economy. A final set of essays analyzes the forces underlying women's employment, from labor-intensive Southeast Asian export factories in the 1980s to Singapore's foreign-labor-dependent economy and its current productivity challenges. Taken together, the essays show how government, business and labor interact in the process of economic development.