ABSTRACT
Singapore has been a spectacularly successful economy over the past 30 years. Explanations for this record, however, have often tended to emphasize the role of unfettered market forces in shaping the pattern of industrialization and to underestimate the extent to which the Government has been directly instrumental in engineering this success. This case study argues that the quality of the civil service has been critical to these achievements-made possible by a highly instrumental approach to employment and salary policy in the public sector. Wages policy was also used as an important means of changing the economic incentives facing private industry, thereby affecting the long-term comparative advantage of the island state in ways which were to prove highly advantageous for growth and development.
