The answer of course is that Singapore, a speck on the map, with a small population of 3,000,000 is doing very nicely thank you, and doesn't need to tell everybody about it.

Now that's relatively nicely of course... It's hard to be ASEAN's most influential business country and not be affected by the tumbling economies of those around it.. Still one of the most competitive economies world wide, the Rat predicts that, for Singapore, the Asian crisis will eventually prove to be not as bad a thing as expected.

Sure there have been wage decreases, a fall in exports, and a general standard of living, but companies like Singapore Airlines, for example, are goinf much better than anybody could expected. This week they picked up another prestigious award for the World's best airline, and company reports show that the kitty is full..

So.. to the reasons...

Pre-Asian crisis, Singapore was facing major trouble, mainly caused by raising competitiveness from neighbouring countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia. Many companies were relocating their regional headquarters from Singapore to lower rent and cost locations, salary rises and property prices were choking profitability and attractiveness to foreign investors, and they were continually getting a bad press on authoritarian governance. Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, India, and the Philippines were looking like one day, admittedly in the distant future, any one could challenge Singapore's business leadership position in the region.

The leadership was aware of these changes, and planned for them. Recognising Singapore itself offered little in the way of a domestic market, the government urged the entrepreneurs that had made Singapore rich to venture to neighbouring countries to advance their business. In retrospect but in the short term only, it was strategy that is not paying off due to problems in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand in particular. But there was more to this admonishment to "Go West (North, South and East)... young man. Singapore were in fact gearing up not so much to compete and become more dependent on countries in their own region, but to go much further afield..

And this they did quietly with little fanfare.

While we modestly suggested that Singapore had left Mahathir to rattle the Asian values and isolationist can way back in August 1977, events since have reinforced and backed this up to an extent even we didn't predict. Singapore canned the rhetoric and accepted the realities of a global world and quietly went about its business to make Singapore a global city. Sure they passed typical Singaporean laws on the use of the Internet, and continued to stifle any suggestion of dissent to the ruling parties policies and programs. But across the border in Malaysia, Mahathir was to get all the air-play with his much less subtle Asian values campaign to rid himself of opposition in his own party, the deploying of water cannons and truncheon wielding bobbies against his own people in the streets of Kuala Lumpur, and invoking of the Internal Security Act. Singapore can still boast repressive laws that make Malaysia's look like they were written by an anak-anak with burping problems.. However Mahathir got all the press, while Singapore still goes about it quietly yet ruthlessly. The international focus moved from Singapore to Malaysia.. and Singapore did not mind in the slightest.

Similarly, while Indonesia had a mass of poverty within its 200,000,000 population even before the crisis, Singapore had already basically rid itself of poverty, admittedly a much smaller ask with just 3,000,000 in a small island and an economy that was dominated by industry rather than agriculture. The poor Indonesian's rioted when they had had enough of feeling hungry, not because of any political consciousness. Singapore and Malaysia, to a much lesser extent, did not have the same levels of pre-existent poverty. Though many were questioning the authority of their leaders, street action requires a hollow feeling in the belly as a pre-requisite.

But even more critical to Singapore's enviable position vis a vis its neighbours, is that it had planned for the change to globalization. We have already referred to the flat structure in Singapore's national airline compared to other Asian airlines, making decision making faster and more flexible. The massive growth in the Asian airline industry generally in the last decade was due not so much to good management and strategy, but to a fast increasing customer and revenue base, and easy loans to fund expansion. While competing airlines flew on the strength of this only, Singapore Airlines were "restructuring" and "flattening" before the other airlines, often protected by national governments and the worst excesses of business cronyism, had even heard of the jargon.

And while Mahathir was travelling the world convincing tech companies to join Malaysia's "Multi-media Super corridor", Singapore was quietly creating their own intelligent city with more actions than words. Very soon now almost all Singaporeans will be connected to the Internet.

And what did Singapore do when the crisis hit? Rather than isolating their economy they opened up! They cut taxes, liberalised and globalised their financial institutions even more, and a few weeks ago announced they were relaxing entry requirements for foreign workers even more. In other countries, workers have been deported, and in Malaysia, the economy has been insulated from the global financial system by capital controls.

Singapore already has almost half the country connected on line. According to a recent Forbes report..

By the fall of this year every household on this tiny, densely populated island of 3.2 million will be hooked up for Singapore ONE(one network for everyone) service. This high-speed broadband network operates at one hundred times the speed of standard dial-up modems. This government-conceived, privately operated system can easily handle live video streaming, movie-quality video, interactive multimedia applications and services such as video-on-demand and education-on-demand. Singapore's schools, offices, libraries and government agencies will be connected.

While the rest of ASEAN attempted slyly to draw Singapore into the mess by appealing to their sense of geography, Singaporean leaders have quietly and diplomatically asserted themselves as wishing to belong to the world rather than ASEAN alone. In the past few weeks Singapore has started to assert the strength that their wealth and smart strategies have afforded them. They announced that Malaysia had only one month to establish they really own the land on which the Singapore railway station sits, and they are moving to establish alternative supplies of water from Indonesia rather than Malaysia.

While other Asian economies made bold statements that their economies would not be affected and one by one they fell like dominoes, Singapore kept quiet, and even now makes very modest assessments of their recovery prospects.

Perhaps the Singaporean's paid heed to the wise statement overhead by the Rat in the lobby of Hong Kong's Peninsula hotel several years ago passed between two earnest looking Chinese businessmen..

"...The best way to keep face is to keep the lower half shut..."