Singapore : Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the State

The city-state of Singapore is a rare case of market autocracy. The government systematically suppresses political dissent through its courts and legislature, and political power is concentrated almost entirely in the hands of a small governing body: the Cabinet of Ministers. At the same time, Singapore has highly liberal markets: low taxes, few regulations, strong property protections, and fair and efficient commercial courts. Building on Mancur Olson’s “stationary bandit” model, I argue that a small coalition of elites has, through the use of Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds, established a wide encompassing interest in the productivity of the country over a multigenerational time horizon. By becoming a residual claimant to the nation’s land and capital, the government is able to emulate many of the development-enhancing properties we conventionally associate with democracies