The scale-up state: Singapore’s industrial policy for the digital economy

Neil Lee, Metta Ni and Augustin Boey

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The Singaporean state has played a crucial role in the country’s economic development. This led to concerns that a state-steered economy would be unable to develop fast-changing, disruptive sectors that are reliant on individual entrepreneurship, such as digital technology. Yet Singapore has become a world leader in the scaling of digital technology firms. In this paper, we consider how this happened. We show that advances in ICT opened a window of locational opportunity in digital tech, which was spotted by Singaporean policymakers open to experimentation. A distinctive ‘Singapore model’ developed to take advantage of this opportunity, exploiting Singapore’s geographical position, open economy, and business environment but combining this with active state intervention. To address coordination problems in the creation of an entrepreneurial ecosystem, Singaporean policymakers worked through a process we term ‘network coordination’ across the whole of government. While overall rates of entrepreneurship remain low, the country has been successful at scaling firms in the digital technology sector. These primarily focused on consumer applications and non-Singaporean markets, but there has been little development in frontier ‘deep tech’.

Keywords: digital technology; Singapore; developmental states; industrial policy; entrepreneurial ecosystems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 L81 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2024-06-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-ict, nep-ind, nep-ino, nep-inv, nep-sbm and nep-sea
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