World Bank charts Singapore’s rise from slums to world city

Source : Business Times - 17 Feb 2009

Singapore’s development experience warranted a factbox in the recent World Development Report, published annually by the World Bank.

In the latest issue released last November, the authors charted the country’s move from ’slums to world city’.

‘Doing so is a tall order for any government, but Singapore shows it can be done,’ the report says.

The World Bank noted that at independence in 1965, 70 per cent of Singapore’s households lived in badly overcrowded conditions, and a third of its people squatted on the city fringes.

‘Unemployment averaged 14 per cent, GDP (gross domestic product) per capita was less than US$2,700, and half of the population was illiterate. Falling mortality rates and migration from the Malay Peninsula implied rapid population growth, further increasing the pressure on both housing and employment: 600,000 additional units of housing were needed, and private supply was less than 60,000,’ the report says.

However, the slums were cleared within a few decades and Singapore became one of the cleanest and most advanced cities in the world, says the World Bank. The secret was in institutional reforms that created a government renowned for its accountability, which became a major provider of infrastructure and services.

A housing authority was also created to clear slums, build houses and renew the urban landscape, says the report. ‘At the height of the programme, HDB was building a new flat every eight minutes,’ it notes.

The World Bank concludes that ‘for a city-state in a poor region, it is not an exaggeration to assert that effective urbanisation was responsible for delivering growth rates that averaged 8 per cent a year throughout the 1970s and 1980s’.

‘It required a combination of market institutions and social service provision, strategic investment in infrastructure, and improved housing for slum dwellers.’

However, it notes that Singapore’s success was not easily replicated for any country that is not a city-state. ‘Perhaps the most successful example of how slums can be eradicated, Singapore is to some extent an anomaly . . . Most countries will not be able to replicate Singapore’s efforts - aligning priorities and the effort of central, state, and city governments is difficult for any country that is not a city-state,’ the report concludes.

Other schemes that came in for praise were Singapore’s pricing of vehicles to reduce congestion, which the World Bank calls ‘extreme but effective’.