ABSTRACT
Singapore’s prominence in the global marketplace has been increasingly recognized in recent years. The Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) ranked Singapore as an ‘alpha plus’ 1 world city in 2008 (GaWC, 2008). Singapore is the world’s principal logistics hub, the third largest oil-refining centre, the fifth largest foreign exchange trading centre and one of South-East Asia’s major cities for transportation, aviation, financial services and investment (Hoong, 2009). It was also the ‘most globalized country’ on the A.T.Kearney/Foreign Policy globalization index, which compared sixty-two countries across four dimensions of economic integration, personal contact, technological connectivity and political engagement (Foreign Policy, 2006). Singapore is ranked fourth after London, New York and Tokyo on the Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, 2008, a comparative ranking of seventy-five of the world’s leading global cities on seven dimensions: legal and political framework, economic stability, ease of doing business, financial flow, business centre, knowledge creation and information flow, and liveability (Mastercard Worldwide, 2008). Since 2008, Singapore has been the world’s easiest place to do business (World Bank, 2010) and in 2010 it was ranked first worldwide amongst fifty-eight countries in the World Competitiveness Yearbook (World Competitiveness Center, 2010). The list goes on.
