ABSTRACT
Can Singapore develop into a regional financial centre, embedding itself as the core in an Asia-Pacific version of the OECD? In the three decades after independence in 1965, Singapore did move from a concentration on trade and commercial activity to an active money and capital market, an increasingly sophisticated stock market linking gold, commodity, capital and foreign exchange transactions of Asian markets with markets in Australia, Europe and the US. If using different categories of financial transactions to identify this emerging international financial centre of Singapore, the primary achievement would be in commercial banking and, in particular, the regional presence of the DBS, absorbing majority stakes in Thai and Indonesian banks and its role as banker for the Singapore government in China, the US, and South and Southeast Asia. Important, too, here is the number of international banks operating in Singapore with the rise in foreign financial assets and the utilization of the city-state as a base for investment projects in Southeast Asia. The range and scope of these financial strategies is important for innovations in investment strategies and modes of entry into these economies in an era of rapid economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s.
