The dilemma of a more advanced developing country: conflicting views on the development strategy of Singapore

摘要

ON January 1, 1995 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) decided to stop classifying Singapore as a developing country and reclassified it along with Brunei, the Bahamas, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as a "more advanced developing country." Ires was the follow-up to a decision made in 1992 to remove these high-income countries from the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) list of developing countries eligible to receive aid. It seems likely that in Singapore's case the expectation was that it would apply for full OECD membership, which automatically brings with it developed country status, but this was resisted by the Singapore authorities. The Republic of Korea, on the other hand, graduated to the "Super League" in October 1997. Singapore's omission was a curious development and naturally stimulated some discussion in Singapore and provoked an official justification. The World Bank in its World Development Report, 1997 continued to classify Singapore as a "high-income economy," along with developed countries such as the United States and Japan, but with a footnote qualification that it is one of the economies "classified by the United Nations or otherwise regarded by their authorities as developing." This qualification also applied to some other high-income countries, namely, Hong Kong, UAE, Kuwait, and Israel, but no longer to Korea.