One of the main economic players responsible for Singapore’s economic success is its small and medium-sized enterprises or SMEs. Their overall success has helped propel the country and its people forward. From economic policies to politics, Singapore is a planned and regulated economy. Singapore’s economic success story is actually the result of a form of capitalism carefully calibrated and controlled by the government. An important element or aspect of good critical success factors (CSFs) emerges from the role being played by the government. The existence of good government or public policies that are pro-business is vital for the success of firms. Despite the fact that government policies and CSFs are widely studied in areas around the world including in Singapore, there is no comprehensive prediction model available to test if firms have potential to be successful or are more prone to failures. Much research investigates the non-financial factors contributing to success versus failure of small firms, but empirical tests of the predictability of these factors are less common. This book, which is primarily quantitative/ positivist in nature will attempt to fill this gap.

While some e-government projects fail to deliver the expected benefits due to numerous technical, organizational, institutional, and contextual factors, information technology continues to be utilized by international governments to achieve countless benefits. E-Government Success around the World: Cases, Empirical Studies, and Practical Recommendations presents the latest findings in the area of e-government success. Written for academics and professionals, this book aims to improve the understanding of e-government success factors and cultural contexts in the field of governmental information technologies in various disciplines such as political science, public administration, information and communication sciences, and sociology.

This book explores the best ways for governments to design venture capital investment incentives. Venture capital is a multi-billion-dollar industry and a major driver of innovation and national growth. Investment in startup companies by venture capital funds helps finance new inventions and create wealth, economic growth, and jobs. However, because venture capital investment is highly risky and sensitive to market downturns, many governments around the world use special legal and tax incentives to help encourage this form of investment. Since the introduction of the first venture capital incentive in the USA in 1958, scores of venture capital incentives have come and gone. These incentives have experienced varied success, with some failing entirely. Filling a gap in an important area, this book employs a legal and regulatory approach to examine venture capital policy from a global perspective. It uses an analytical framework to evaluate the design, implementation, and success of incentives, and looks at over 60 examples from 25 countries around the world. The book is aimed at researchers and policy makers in law, finance and economics, as well as practitioners and investors in the venture capital space. The book introduces the legal aspects of venture capital investment and presents a list of leading practice guidelines and recommendations to help policy makers design effective, efficient, and appropriate venture capital incentives.

Silicon Valley has become shorthand for a globally acclaimed way to unleash the creative potential of venture capital, supporting innovation and creating jobs. In The Venture Capital State Robyn Klingler-Vidra traces how and why different states have adopted distinct versions of the Silicon Valley model. Venture capital seeks high rewards but is enveloped in high risk. The author’s deep investigations of venture capital policymaking in East Asian states (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore) show that success does not reflect policymakers’ ability to replicate the Silicon Valley model. Instead, she argues, performance reflects their skill in adapting a highly lauded model to their local context. Policymakers are "contextually rational" in their learning; their context-rooted norms shape their preferences. The normative context for learning about policy—how elites see themselves and what they deem as locally appropriate—informs how they design their efforts. The Venture Capital State offers a novel conceptualization of rationality, bridging diametrically opposed versions of bounded and conventional rationality. This new understanding of rationality is simultaneously fully informed and context based, and it provides a framework by which analysts can bring domestic factors to the very heart of international diffusion of policy. Klingler-Vidra concludes that states have a visible hand in constituting even quintessentially neoliberal markets.

This book analyses the determining factors behind productivity and innovation amongst Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore, and within the context of South East Asia, in order to offer recommendations for increasing productivity and aiding economic growth. SME firms are an influential driver of economic growth in advanced world economies like the USA, Germany, Japan and South Korea. Throughout the 2000s, Singapore experienced a decline in economic growth which was linked to decreasing productivity in its SMEs. The decline triggered a transformational policy by a Government intent on forging a ‘high skill–high productivity’ future. Given substantial evidence that low productivity growth occurred in sectors where immigrants dominated the workforce, the seeds of recovery focused on improving productivity and innovation amongst SMEs in those sectors. Hence, this book investigates the factors determining productivity amongst SMEs across the manufacturing sector. It utilises personal interviews with global experts and CEOs, combined with primary data collected from a major international Delphi survey, and interviews with 215 SME owners and managers in Singapore. This data helps us to better understand how these productivity-enhancing factors can be used to increase performance amongst SMEs. By investigating the nature and process of total factor productivity in Singapore’s SMEs, this book tells the policy story behind the revolution. To provide a comparative analysis, Singapore’s story is placed within a South East Asian context. The unfolding narrative contains important lessons for policy makers and industry globally, as they assess the strategic choices available to them for improving productivity and innovation. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of innovation and productivity, as well as economic development officers, government policy advisors, SME business managers and sustainable businesses.