AHC/WI Singapore of the Caribbean
- Thread starter tonsofun
- Start date
It's quite hard - Singapore and Hong Kong are fundamentally trading ports, and right on one of the world's biggest trade routes. Apart from Panama - which is more through traffic - there isn't nearly as much in the area. Best guess is maybe a surviving Confederacy and better governed South/Central america would be needed - good governance on one Caribbean island just isn't enough IMHO.
Ja.
You'd have to have all the advantages of Costa Rica (politically) with Panama (trade) with massive amounts of luck.
Admiral Beez
Banned
Not to be overly "culturalist" but you'd need a different demographic. What makes Singapore successful vs. it's Malay and Indonesian neighbours is its Chinese population and cultural/business work ethic.
The most productive Malaysian city, Kuala Lumpur has a GDP of US$24K, while Singapore has a GDP of US$55K. And it's quickly downhill for the rest of the Malay cities. As with Malaya/Indonesia's Muslim/Polynesian roots, the Caribbean cities suffer under the low productivity of the Caribbean culture.
In order for a Singapore in the Caribbean to take place we need to move more productive people there. How about Britain makes a Jewish homeland out of one of its islands? Or, one island is populated by Scots instead of slaves?
New Orleans is the only one I can think of.
But it has to be in the hands of someone powerful like a European power, and the USA has to control the rest of the Mississippi. Controlling a large fraction of the trade from the Mississippi basin to the rest of the world would be enough to keep it afloat, maybe even independent after or if the European power leaves.
So how to get this arrangement? France could sell everything but New Orleans, but would the USA accept that deal? The British could capture New Orleans, but would the USA let that situation stand?
But it has to be in the hands of someone powerful like a European power, and the USA has to control the rest of the Mississippi. Controlling a large fraction of the trade from the Mississippi basin to the rest of the world would be enough to keep it afloat, maybe even independent after or if the European power leaves.
So how to get this arrangement? France could sell everything but New Orleans, but would the USA accept that deal? The British could capture New Orleans, but would the USA let that situation stand?
I believe the term is "racist"—I'm sure had this forum existed a hundred years ago, you would've fit well into the crowd that associated the Chinese with disorder (see the origin of "Chinese fire drill"). But no, I'm sure culture is more important than trade patterns or anything like that.
Lol.
No, seriously, lol.
I saw one of these idiotic "Chinese are superior to Malays" rants a few months ago, and ran an experiment asking people how rich they think Malaysia is. They all underestimated it - 89% here, 97% in my Twitter feed, most by a factor of more than 2. Malaysia, as a whole, has a GDP per capita of $25,000, twice as high as China. Indonesia is barely below China. See discussion here and here.
What you're doing is the equivalent of claiming, in 2016, that the Irish are lazy and superstitious and that's why Ireland is poor. If you want to be racist, at least find an ethnic group that's actually poor to hate on.
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Flocculencio
Donor
Wow.
Yeah it has nothing to do with the fact that Singapore has a superb harbour smack bang along the major sea passage from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean and was historically the major entrepot for all of British Malaya and later the whole of ASEAN while KL was a town set up to handle tin mining which later became a political capital and is in a far less advantageous postion to handle commerce because the institutions are all already in Singapore.
There's a major problem with trying to turn a random island into a Singapore: Singapore has a land connection to Malaysia. Tin from Malaysian mines was sent to Singapore by railway, and thence to the rest of the world by ship. Hong Kong Island did not have a land connection until well into the postwar era, but Kowloon did, and is a kilometer away from the island. Not even Trinidad is that close to the mainland, not to mention that the mainland that it's close to is economically underdeveloped.
Panama is probably everyone's best bets. It's already the second fastest-growing economy of Latin America, after Chile (this is an average from 1980 to 2010). Its main problem is that the overland connections to the rest of Central America are terrible, and it's difficult to develop such connections, because of the elevation differences and the risk of deforestation and what it would do to the canal's water reservoirs.
Panama is probably everyone's best bets. It's already the second fastest-growing economy of Latin America, after Chile (this is an average from 1980 to 2010). Its main problem is that the overland connections to the rest of Central America are terrible, and it's difficult to develop such connections, because of the elevation differences and the risk of deforestation and what it would do to the canal's water reservoirs.
Admiral Beez
Banned
That was not my intention, but the reader gets to decide the meaning of what is written, not the author; so apologies to any I offended. My intention was to consider historical and contemporary cultural differences and their impact on economic success, for example, much of the Caribbean and Latin America is founded on exploitation from slavery, genocide or other exploitations, followed by (especially in Latin America) by military coups, and later by interference by narco gangs and overall political instability, making it difficult to emulate Singapore, where their story is so different.
It's got nothing to do with race, but with having the right economic, cultural and political conditions to mirror Singapore's success, along with the good fortune of geographic advantages, such as the above poster's mention of Singapore's ideal location for tin export. These conditions are hard to come by. Had Singapore gone communist for example, they might not have had them either. There are few places I see in the region that have those conditions, but there are some, including Belize, with its strong ties to Britain (became fully independent only in 1983) and Costa Rica, which for decades has been one of the most politically and economically stable countries in the region. Surinam and French Guiana are also well connected with Europe, offering benefits of trade and political stability.
Seemingly inconsistent with the above, another strong benefit to Singapore was its political stability - essentially run by the same leadership throughout much of its history. Of course you have long-ruling strongmen in the Caribbean and Latin America, including Chavez in Venezuela, but none that see had the success of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and his successors.
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Jesus wept.
Please DO expand on how the culture in Singapore is superior. Considering you were already kicked before for racist posting of this kind before the result should be fascinating.
Okay, so other than the country that contains 95% of the world's Chinese population, Chinese people have the right cultural attitudes for economic success.
Actually, Belize has the same GDP per capita as El Salvador (~$8,000) and both are only marginally richer than Guatemala (~$7,000). Costa Rica is substantially richer (~$14,000), and Panama is by a large margin the richest (~$20,000) in Central America. Political stability isn't everything. North Korea is politically stable.
North Korea's had an even longer continuity of government.
Or, if you want an intermediate example, consider Mexico. The PRI had unbroken continuity of government from the 1930s to 2000, and moreover, its control was institutional rather than personal. There was widespread corruption and election rigging, but the one-term limit was always strictly adhered to, and when their six years were over, presidents would hand-pick a successor and retire with their stolen wealth. The transition to actual democracy in the 1990s was, by most standards, smooth, and elections today are competitive and democratic.
And yet... Mexico didn't really take off. My college political science textbooks praised it as the perfect dictatorship, mentioning high growth rates, but a lot of that growth was population growth; per capita income grew at the same rate as in the US, and Mexico has spent the entire period since 1900 with a GDP per capita between 1/4 and 1/3 that of the US.
In contrast, South Korea, the biggest poster child of postwar economic success - Singapore, in contrast, was already the richest non-Japan, non-Israel country in Asia - had plenty of political instability. A coup in 1961. A stolen election in the 1970s, followed by a presidential assassination. Demonstrations centered on a restive region with a separate identity that defines itself in opposition to the region the national leadership came from. Police shooting at protesters. A slow return to electoral normality, but with a divided reform camp. If I didn't tell you it was South Korea, you'd think it was some failed state in Latin America.
When questioned by critics of globalization about South Korea's high tariffs, John Williamson, the economist who first coined the term "Washington consensus" (and meant it positively), noted that the similarity in growth between the four East Asian Tigers suggests that economists should look at commonalities between them rather than differences. Per Williamson, South Korea indeed had high tariffs, but Taiwan and Singapore didn't, and Hong Kong was at the other end, with free trade. Instead, he points to their export-oriented growth models (with ample state subsidies in Korea and Singapore but not Hong Kong) and high personal savings rates.
We can make the same argument re government form. Singapore has had political stability, under a mildly authoritarian government (mildly, because the Lee clan is as far from actual fascism as Chavez was from Soviet communism). South Korea, nope. All of these countries have had modern capitalist governments rather than either traditional rule (think Saudi Arabia, or Bhutan) or communism, but pretty much every country in the world today has a modern capitalist government nowadays.
Of course, the other Tigers did not have Singapore's locational advantage... but again, Singapore and Hong Kong were twice as rich than Taiwan and South Korea in the 1950s; their locations gave them a leg up before WW2, whereas the commonalities only emerged and became relevant later.
Chavez was in power from 1999 to 2013, and Maduro almost certainly gets the boot next election. That's not particularly long-ruling.
By the way, I'm kind of kicking myself for forgetting, but in 1980, the Bahamas was a rich country. It subsequently declined - its GDP per capita today is actually a bit lower than in 1990. Antigua and Barbuda kept growing, but not fast. Those were very different economically from Singapore - you can't be an entrepot on an island that's far from any hinterland - but they were by the standards of the 1980s quite rich.
Trinidad kept growing, and is richer than Poland today. Its problem is that it exports natural gas, which was a nice racket in 2008 and is not so useful now; it's poorer today than it was 8 years ago (as are the Bahamas and Antigua).
Trinidad kept growing, and is richer than Poland today. Its problem is that it exports natural gas, which was a nice racket in 2008 and is not so useful now; it's poorer today than it was 8 years ago (as are the Bahamas and Antigua).
Panama does seem like one of the best choices. Advantageous location meaning lots of sea traffic, largest free port in the Americas, IIRC Copa Airlines is a major and growing airline in the region and beyond. If they could find some way for the Torrijos-Carter Treaties to include a trade agreement to allow them to build up a low cost export sector for export to the US that would provide a decent base to build from, avoiding authoritarian governments would be nice but not vital if you look at Singapore - someone like Noriega however needs to be avoided like the plague.
Does it have to be close to the mainland? In their original post all tonsofun wrote was '... a highly populated city, rich and very developed while maintaining some sort of independence'. I suggested Trinidad and Tobago under the assumption that geographic location wasn't a factor.
Singapore just happens to be very advantageously situated on one of the world's most important trade lanes (as others have said). Hong Kong is perched atop the world's largest closed market (not so closed anymore but I digress). Those are the primary reasons they have become rich. All that good, stable governance stuff only helped after the fact.
The only way to do something like that would be an America-screw. Sometime after WW2 maybe an unrepetant theocrat gains power, and you have a wealthy but closed market. Then somewhere like Havana could become somewhere like Hong Kong.
The only way to do something like that would be an America-screw. Sometime after WW2 maybe an unrepetant theocrat gains power, and you have a wealthy but closed market. Then somewhere like Havana could become somewhere like Hong Kong.
Admiral Beez
Banned
It's not racist to point out that some nations have cultural and historical advantages over others, making it easier to achieve the level of economic and political success found in Singapore. Indeed, race has nothing to do with it, but culture and cultural history does. Singapore did not have to overcome slavery, outside political interference, genocide and colonial exploitation to the level faced by much of the Caribbean and Latin America. Certainly as a British colony there was exploitation of Singapore, but nothing like what was faced in the Caribbean and Latin America. Combined with geopolitical limitations, this region faces much greater challenges in achieving Singapore's success.
I contend that it does, and that Singapore and Hong Kong's proximity to the mainland is what allowed them to grow as regional entrepots. 19c Singapore's economy was based on being the port where Malaysian primary exports like tin and rubber were loaded from train to ship. By the mid-20c, it also became a convenient center for Indonesian exports. This could not have happened if it had had wider separation from the mainland. This separation ensures that e.g. the Bahamas could never be a gateway to Florida or Trinidad to Venezuela. (Trinidad had a lot of growth in the 1990s and 2000s, but that was gas exports.)
I'm pretty sure Havana is too far. If the US is a wealthy but closed market, the natural gateways to it are Vancouver and Montreal. But even that's not a great analogy, since mid-20c China was not wealthy - most of it was a rural subsistence-level economy. Hong Kong and Singapore's growth came from being the richest places in poor regions. In an America-screw TL - or for that matters in OTL in the late 18c - the natural gateways are places within the US with good inland and ocean access, i.e. New York. For that matter, in China it was not just Hong Kong but also Shanghai, which was already a middle-income city in the late 1970s by that era's standards.
You realize we're comparing Singapore to other British colonies like the Bahamas, Trinidad, Barbados, and Antigua, right? There's a limit to how much you can stretch this Anglophilia + Black Legend mentality here. Think why you were so bullish on Belize, never mind how unimpressive its living standards are by Hispanic Central American standards.
And as for slavery, I'm amused by how much the HBD types have come up with it as an explanation for permanent black inferiority, one that cannot possibly be mitigated by either internal or external policy. The reality is that the Caribbean islands, all founded as slave colonies, have vast internal differences in wealth levels, from Haiti ($1,700) to Puerto Rico ($34,000 on paper, less than that if you compare personal incomes to US incomes). Or, if you dislike Haiti for its special history and Puerto Rico because it's a US colony, then from Jamaica ($8,500) to Trinidad ($30,500). For the same reason you should try using shared economic attributes to explain similar growth in the East Asian Tigers, you should avoid using shared attributes to explain the Caribbean given a factor of 4 internal difference in GDP per capita.
Admiral Beez
Banned
Fair points, and a good reminder to look at each country individually.
Without ASB, can we make Venezuela our Latin American Singapore? It's got a massive wealth in resources (not just oil, but also vast reserves of bauxite, gold, iron ore and natural gas), and is ideally positioned for maritime trade. If not a Singapore, can Venezuela become a Latin American Norway, with its dominance in oil supporting strong cradle to grave social services, success in education and living standards? If we can get a transcontinental railway built, along with a stronger free trade agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_Free_Trade_Association Caracas could be a major economic terminal, like Singapore.
http://schillerinstitute.org/news_briefs/2015/0418-south_america-bioceanic_corridor.html
Before the oil crash, Venezuela was expanding their rail network with advanced tech, http://www.railway-technology.com/projects/-tinaco-anaco-railway-line-venezuela/
IMO, Venezuela seems a good candidate for our Singapore analogue.
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