Jun Jie Woo

This book aims to provide a broad and accessible overview of the institutions, processes, and actors that define and determine public policies in Singapore. Through the application of cutting-edge public policy theories and the use of case studies, this book will provide both academic and general readers with a comprehensive overview of Singapore's public policy processes and how these have contributed to the city-state's policy successes. In doing so, this book aims to provide a systematic understanding of public policy in Singapore that is accessible to a wide range of readers.

From the financial contagion of the 2007 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) to viral contagion in the recent COVID-19 pandemic, Singapore has been severely impacted by ripples and shockwaves that have emanated from global financial and healthcare crises. At the same time, it has proven to be highly resilient amidst such instability. This book provides an in-depth account of Singapore's policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and GFC. It focuses on the policy capacity-building efforts that have taken place in the aftermath of earlier crises such as the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak and the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.Linked across time and space, these four crises — SARS, COVID-19, the AFC and GFC — reflect a consistent pattern in Singapore's approach to crisis management. This is a pattern that involves policy learning and capacity-building after each crisis, and the application of these lessons and capacities to subsequent crises. In focusing on the role of policy capacity in Singapore's crisis response measures, this book will provide policymakers and practitioners with a useful framework that can be used to plan for future crises and pandemics.

This book focuses on the policy capacities, built up since the 2003 SARS crisis, that have contributed to Singapore’s Covid-19 response efforts. In doing so, the book discusses the fiscal, operational, analytical and political capacities that have driven Singapore's policy response to the pandemic, and proposes a broad policy capacity framework that will be applicable to the analysis of other contexts as well. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about massive disruptions in societies and economies across the world. Singapore’s early success in managing the Covid-19 pandemic has received much attention from researchers and observers from across the world. A study by the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University had described Singapore’s early efforts to detect and contain Covid-19 as the “gold standard of near-perfect detection”. Despite its success in containing Covid-19 infections, Singapore has also faced challenges arising from systemic policy blind spots, resulting in high levels of infection in its migrant worker dormitories. With that, the book also discusses the systemic blind spots and policy shortcomings that have emerged in Singapore’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and provides policy recommendations on policy capacity-building for future pandemics and crises. The book will be of strong interest to scholars and students of public policy and crisis management, especially those who specialise in healthcare policy and pandemic response. Given the ongoing challenges posed by Covid-19 as well as the continued risks of other future infectious disease outbreaks, the book will also be useful for policymakers and practitioners seeking to draw policy lessons from Singapore’s experience with the SARS and Covid-19 outbreaks.

3-in-1: Governing a Global Financial Centre provides a comprehensive understanding of Singapore's past development and future success as a global financial centre. It focuses on three transformational processes that have determined the city-state's financial sector development and governance — globalisation, financialisation, and centralisation — and their impacts across three areas: the economy, governance, and technology. More importantly, this book takes a multidimensional approach by considering the inter-related and interdependent nature of these three transformational processes. Just like the 3-in-1 coffee mix that is such an ubiquitous feature of everyday life in Singapore, the individual ingredients of Singapore's success as a global financial centre do not act alone, but as an integrated whole that manifests itself in one final product: the global financial centre.