THE INVESTOR
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advisers, with offices also in Hong Kong and
Shanghai.‘Singapore is still a growing centre
and a regional headquarters for many
international companies,’ says Joel
Carpenter, Group Marketing Manager of
St. James’s Place Asia.‘It’s an attractive
place to work and Bali,Thailand and
Malaysia are all within easy reach.’
Some companies offer attractive packages
to encourage expatriates to relocate,
often including housing, medical care,
education, flights home, a car and utility
expenses. Expatriates may find their
ANALYSIS
disposable income is initially high while
these living costs are covered. St. James’s
Place Partner Daphne Ashford-Smith
observes that, although many expatriates
are on local two-year contracts,
a growing number are deciding to stay on.
In terms of quality of life and government
policy, there are some differences.The
government encourages women to return
to work after giving birth and offers some
help towards this with tax relief on the
employment of domestic workers; but paid
maternity leave is only eight weeks and
Ashford-Smith says that many families
need to have both parents in work to help
cover the costs of childcare if these are not
covered.Working hours in Singapore tend
to be long but Ashford-Smith says that
having access to good and reasonably
affordable childcare has helped her to return
to full-time work with two children and
another on the way, and enabled her to enjoy
quality time with her children.
The availability of good education,
compatible with the British system, has
increased considerably over the past two
decades, removing the perceived
requirement to send children back to the
UK for secondary education. In addition to
well-established local schools likeTanglin
Trust School, Marlborough College has
opened a campus nearby in southern
Malaysia. Pupils can migrate from the school
inAsia to the main school in the UK
if their parents return to the UK. Dulwich
College has also opened a school in
Singapore under franchise.
George Rippon, Partner at St. James’s
Place Asia, has noticed that more and more
people are coming out to set up their own
businesses, so the need for personal financial
planning for expatriates has never been
greater. Overseas companies no longer see
themselves as having to provide long-term
financial security for non-nationals,
he says. In any case, the majority of British
expatriates will repatriate to the UK on
retirement so are more likely to need
financial arrangements there.
The challenges that faced Singapore
when it first became independent may
have been resolved but today it faces
fresh social, economic and political
challenges.Yet this tiny tropical island’s
ability to evolve quickly and consistently
suggests it will continue to thrive in our
rapidly changing world.
1TheWorld Bank 2014
2
3
In 1978 Deng Xiaoping, as leader of the
Chinese Communist Party, made an official visit
to Singapore just as he was embarking on the
programme of radical economic reform that
created modern China.
He remained interested in Singapore’s
development from island backwater to
a thriving international economy during his
time as China’s leader. On Lee Kuan Yew’s
death in 2015, the Chinese Communist Party
lauded him as a ‘uniquely influential Asian
statesman and a strategist, boasting both
Eastern values and an international vision’.
Singapore’s aim of blending free-market
capitalism with centralised control and
domestic obedience, while managing its
economic growth and still considerable
inequality, carries plenty of lessons for China.
But the challenge for China with a
population of 1.4 billion will be harder than
it was for Singapore’s 5.5 million
3
.
CLOSE LINKS WITH CHINA
Singapore: celebrating past
success as it continues to
build for the future
The need for personal
financial planning for
expatriates has never
been greater
Balance sheet
Singapore has proven to be an
economic success story, but the island must continue to
adapt to meet new challenges over the next 50 years.
