Managing the Smart City-State: Singapore Approaches the 21st Century1

Singapore has a remarkable reputation for its successful deployment of limited resources and for its strength and stability even during Asia's current economic crisis. Widespread recognition and attempts by other countries and cities at emulation of some of the strategies it has adopted have confirmed that Singapore has achieved longstanding aspirations for excellence in many areas. As Singapore positions itself to enter the new millennium the government's distinctive and sometimes controversial corporate management style is evidenced in its approach to such matters as growing the economy, enhancing the physical infrastructure, constraining residential segregation, and encouraging increased family size to enhance domestic labour supply. Sometimes it is the means of achieving the desired ends which attracts criticism, at others it is the goals themselves which are questioned. This paper examines some of the features of Singapore's drive to enhance its regional and global role in vastly different circumstances from those which confronted the same government at internal independence in 1959 and full independence in 1965.     

Use of an expert system to map forest soils from a geographical information system

Abstract

Mapping forest soils using conventional methods is time consuming and expensive. An expert system is described and applied to the mapping of five forest soil-landscape units formed on a single granitoid parent material. Three thematic maps were considered important in influencing the distribution of soils. The first showed the distribution of nine classes of native eucalypt forests, and the second and third were derived from a digital elevation model and represented slope gradient and a soil wetness index combined with topographical position. These layers were input to a raster based geographical information system (GIS) and then geometrically co-registered to a regular 30 m grid. From a knowledge of soil distributions, the relationships between the soil-landscape units and the three data layers were quantified by an experienced soil scientist and used as rules in a rule based expert system. The thematic layers accessed from the GIS provided data for the expert system to infer the forest soil-landscape unit most likely to occur at any given pixel. The soil-landscape map output by the expert system compared favourably with a conventional soil-landscape map generated using interpretation of aerial photographs.     

Competition and co-operation in the semi-periphery: closer economic partnership and sectoral transformations in Chile and New Zealand

The signing of a strategic economic partnership (the Trans-Pacific SEP or P4) between Chile, New Zealand, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam in 2005 reveals the emergence of a new generation of trade agreements that seek to promote longer-term synergies and cooperation. This is in marked contrast with a purely competitive, market-based model of agreements whereby economies are opened up to oligopsonistic capital. The orientation is clearly more neostructural and strategic in construction, emphasizing the opportunities within the global economy of improved relations with similarly positioned economies within the semi-periphery. This article analyses both the basis for and implications of the P4 for Chile and New Zealand by looking at three sectors in which both countries are competitive in export markets: dairy, wine and fisheries. By assessing similarities and differences, and the ways in which competition or co-operation might be established, the potential impacts of the agreement can be posited. Within a global context of bilateral and multilateral commercial agreements, it is this type of agreement that perhaps best fits the needs of smaller economies in the periphery that seek to establish greater competitive space for their exports in core economies without engaging in a mutually destructive war of competition in similar sectors and products.