Singapore's Global Reach: Situating the City-State in the Global Economy

Abstract

Urban competitiveness has become a critical issue confronting cities throughout the Asia Pacific region. As a city-state in Southeast Asia, Singapore has been highly proactive in creating and sustaining its competitiveness as a strategic nodal point in the global space of flows. In this paper, we aim to discuss Singapore's global reach vis-a-vis a set of national development strategies that shape the global competitiveness of the city-state. We argue that the creation and reproduction of urban competitiveness in Singapore is highly dependent upon the state's capabilities to exercise power and implement national development strategies that situate the city-state in a beneficial manner to the global space of flows. In Singapore, these national development strategies can be analyzed in three broad areas. First, Singapore has sought to serve as a centre for the spatial agglomeration of high value-added and high- tech investments in leading industries. Second, since the mid-1980s, Singapore has been actively seeking regional headquarters of leading global corporations to locate in the city-state. This has enabled Singapore to become a genuine international business hub, serving countries and companies within and beyond the Southeast Asian region. Third, and more recently, Singapore has begun to regionalise its domestic economy, generating intra- and inter-regional interdependencies. Together, these three key national development strategies have contributed to the sustained competitiveness of Singapore as an economically dynamic city in the Southeast Asian region.