Singapore’s spectacular economic transformation from a Third World country in 1959 with a GDP per capita of US$400 to a First World nation today with a GDP per capita of US$59,798 in 2020 (World Bank, 2022) has been attributed mainly to the efforts of Lee Kuan Yew, who was the first prime minister from June 1959 until November 1990. Apart from Singapore’s rapid economic development, Singapore has also succeeded in minimising corruption as it was ranked fourth globally with Norway and Sweden with a score of 85 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) in 2021. Singapore has been consistently ranked as the least corrupt Asian country on the CPI from 1995-2021 (Transparency International, 2022, p. 2). When Barbara Garson visited the Caltex oil refinery in Singapore probably in the late 1990s, she asked the director of the expansion project, Jack Bradie, why Caltex built their refinery in Singapore instead of Thailand, which had a larger population. Apart from its….
Lee Kuan Yew’s role in minimising corruption in Singapore
