From 1981 to 2004, more than thirty countries modified their government-run pension systems to include individual, private savings accounts.  But pension privatization stopped abruptly in 2005.  What happened?  In the current issue of Governance, Mitchell Orenstein of Northeastern University argues that ideational as well as fiscal factors caused a temporary halt to the privatization trend.  “The tables turned in 2005,” Orenstein says, “with the rise of anti-privatization critiques within the World Bank and the high-profile rejection of pension privatization in the United States.”  Read the article.

Paulette Kurzer

Dr. Jan-Maarten van Sonsbeek and Professor Raymond Gradus recently raised some questions about my argument presented in my Governance article, Disability reform in the Netherlands. They claim that the reason for the successful passing of the substantial reforms of the disability insurance fund is primarily due to the structure and details of the new law. The new legislation  clearly differentiated between the severely disabled and other forms of disability and built upon years of smaller tweaks and reforms. They believe that the 2006 reforms did not provoke an electoral backlash or voter resistance because of its smart design. They would argue that the reforms incorporated a logic that convinced the social partners and voters to go along with the new legislation.

My article has little to say about the actual content of the new legislation. I have no disagreements with the argument that the 2006 reforms made intuitive sense because it drew a sharp distinction between the severely disabled who would never be able to enter the labor market. I think we are also in agreement that  there was a broad consensus in Dutch society that the disability scheme had to be overhauled. We disagree on why there was that consensus in the first place.

I make the argument that Dutch society/voters increasingly embraced views and attitudes that the literature describes as welfare chauvinism. Benefits, especially super generous benefits with few strings attached should go to those who are deserving. Minorities who fail to integrate and assimilate are non-deserving. As a rule, welfare benefits in the Netherlands (and other European countries) are divorced from the origin of the claimant. They are universal. Solidarity meant that voters tolerated the generosity of disability claims even when it was obvious that many ‘disabled’ could possibly have found other kinds of employment or were not fully disabled.  It was this permissive consensus (to use a term from another debate) that made it difficult to introduce more coercive, less generous measures and tighten the eligibility criteria of the disability insurance fund.

However, a substantial minority of Dutch voters harbored many reservations about multiculturalism and non-Western immigrants. The radical rightwing parties of Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders exploited these attitudes and opinions. There is no reason to rehash the topic in this blog. Suffice to say that a sizable minority in the Dutch electorate struggled with the concept that minorities enjoy the same rights as native Dutch when in fact the former fail to meet their societal obligations. These obligations include assimilation and integration into Dutch society.

Van Sonsbeek and Gradus claim that public opinion did not change much even after government studies  officially confirmed that older Turkish and Moroccan immigrants were disproportionaly dependent on social security benefits. However, public opinion polls and survey data collected by Willem de Koster, Peter Achterberg, Jeroen van der Waal  Dick  Houtman   and Anton  Derks (among other scholars) show that attitudes did change in fact. Changed attitudes provided fertile ground for radical rightwing discourse, which  legitimized a debate that  welfare benefits should go to native Dutch who are deserving because they are productive and contributing members of society. My article is based on the public opinion surveys and data of other Dutch academics. They show that a sizable minority of Dutch voters increasingly differentiated between deserving and non-deserving benefit claimants and that the distinction rested on whether a person was native-born or not.

Indeed, the social partners signed off on the reforms because societal attitudes had shifted with regard to the fundamental structure of the disability insurance fund.  Van Sonsbeek and Gradus  conclude that the 2006 reform was accepted because of the structure and intent of the new law was based on an unassailable logic that made sense to voters. The design was smart. They may be right that the design was smart. In political life, however, major reforms are not assessed on the basis of their smartness. History is littered with examples of smart legislation that went nowhere. Rather, voters felt ambivalent about a program that seemed to legitimize fraud and cheating and that provided generous benefits to working-aged minorities who had failed to uphold their side of the societal bargain. That bargain meant integration in Dutch society. As in other European countries, there is a group of voters that is hyper critical of a welfare stat that fails to restrict welfare entitlements to the native population.

That is the basis for the consensus. Politicians and stakeholders found it difficult to defend a system that had fallen out of favor with precisely the kind of voter who is considered the main beneficiary of welfare benefits. The Netherlands is not unique.  In Denmark, reforms have tied the length of one’s residency to benefit eligibility. The new formulation mostly excludes foreign-born immigrants. In many countries, a backlash has taken place against immigrants and that backlash implicates the social welfare state.

Paulette Kurzer is a professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona.

In the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, says Mark Blyth of Brown University, “we were all Keynesians for about twelve months.”  But the Keynesian revival was shortlived.  Why was this?  Blyth surveys the factors that played against a paradigm shift, including the thorough-going penetration of orthodox opinion; disciplinary disincentives to craft alternative ideas; and the fact that there are now “so many distributed but mutually supportive authorities” invested in the status quo.  “In short,” says Blyth, “it is politics, not economics, and it is authority, not facts, that matter for both paradigm maintenance and change.”  Read the article.

In a recent article in Governance, Paulette Kurzer investigates how such a major reform was possible. She argues that it was against all odds: it was done by the center-right Balkenende II cabinet in times of economic growth with fierce opposition of the social partners (trade unions and employers organizations). She puts forward that many voters were not opposed to reform anymore because they learned about the high benefit rates of immigrants, whom they consider not deserving a benefit.

In our opinion, there are some key elements missing in Kurzer’s analysis. First, the 2006 law was not the reform that overshadows all others. Second, unlike the author states, the circumstances for pushing through the WIA reform were good in the early 2000s. Third, the supposed link between acceptance of the reforms by the voters and the attitude of the voters towards ethnic minorities is not so strong as Kurzer suggests. In our opinion, the key element why the WIA law succeeded whereas some earlier system reforms failed, was the smart design of that law.

Raymond Gradus

The 2006 WIA law was the last of a series of successful reforms of the Dutch disability benefit scheme. In our paper “Estimating the effects of recent disability reforms in the Netherlands” (forthcoming in Oxford Economic Papers; already available online), we show that experience rating introduced in 1998 has reduced inflow into the WAO scheme by 13 percentage points and the introduction of the gatekeeper protocol in 2002 has further reduced inflow by 25 percentage points. The additional effect of the new WIA law results in a decrease of inflow by 21 percentage points. This series of reforms by subsequent cabinets shows that there was a broad consensus in Dutch society that the disability scheme somehow had to be reformed.

The system reform in 2006 was not against all odds. The idea for the new law was put forward by a commission of experts from all important political parties in 2001. It recommended that maintenance and use of the available labor capacity of benefit claimants should have the highest priority, and that the main responsibility for ensuring this rests with both employers and employees. In 2002, the social partners agreed upon the core elements of the commission’s proposal. In 2003, the new Balkenende II government, which started in times of economic decline, proposed the new law based on this agreement. The disagreements between government and social partners concerned details of the new law, mainly on the benefit level of the permanently, fully disabled and the use of experience rating for this group. Major disagreements between government and social partners did occur in 2004, but primarily concerned the reform of the early retirement scheme. In short, the WIA law was proposed by a united government with – on the key elements of the law –  support of social partners.

Jan-Maarten van Sonsbeek

The supposed link between acceptance of the reforms by the voters and the attitude of the voters towards ethnic minorities is weak. By the end of 2000, the government for the first time reported on the use of social security benefits by ethnic background. However, although the numbers, showing extremely high proportions of beneficiaries among older Turkish and Moroccan immigrants, caused a lot of publicity, to voters it was a mere confirmation of something they already knew. Accordingly, the opinion of Dutch voters on the broad system of social security did not change a lot in the early 2000s.

Of course, the issues of multiculturalism and integration of ethnic minorities were very prominent in the Netherlands since the rise of Pim Fortuyn in 2002, but these discussions did not really extend to the (perceived) abuse of disability benefits by ethnic minorities. Illustratively, although Pim Fortuyn had strong opinions on reforming disability insurance (without making references to the benefit use of immigrants), during the 2002 election campaign he supported the agreement of the social partners on reform.

When searching for a reason why the new law was so easily accepted by the general public, it is interesting to compare it to an earlier major system reform in 1993, similar in impact to the WIA, that failed due to massive resistance of society. A key factor in the acceptance of the 2006 law may have been its smart design. It distinguishes between the most severely disabled and the less severely disabled, providing a safe and generous benefit for the former. The 1993 reform on the other hand, was more generic and therefore also hurt the most severely disabled. This lack of targeting caused a lot of negative publicity, forcing the new cabinet to relax the 1993 reforms. This conclusion on the importance of the design of a new law may hold important lessons for other countries discussing social security reforms.

Dr. Jan-Maarten van Sonsbeek is head of the Social Funds Unit of UWV, the Employee Benefits Agency of the Netherlands, and researcher at VU University Amsterdam. (Email: jan-maarten.vansonsbeek@uwv.nl)  Raymond Gradus is professor of Public Economics at VU University Amsterdam and director of the Research Institute for the CDA.

Daniel Béland

In their introduction to the special issue, Robert H. Cox of the University of South Carolina and Daniel Béland of the University of Saskatchewan explain the importance of Hall’s 1993 article and provide an overview of the contributions to this special issue.

“The study of policy paradigms,” they conclude, “offers a fundamental challenge to explanations of politics that seek motivations in rational calculations or the material interests of decision makers.” Read the introduction.

I’m very grateful to the journal Governance and its co-editors, Robert Cox and Alasdair Roberts, for publishing my piece, “What Is Governance?”, and to the many scholars and specialists who responded to it.  The reaction has been very helpful to my own thinking, and hopefully will be the basis for more discussions to come.

The vast majority of the comments centered around the criticism that I had chosen too narrow a concept of governance.  This was a problem in two particular respects:  first, that I had deliberately and inappropriately excluded substantive policy goals and normative criteria from my definition of governance (e.g., Visvanathan, Flinders, Kumar) and second, that I had defined governance as a characteristic of states, and within states of executive agencies, in a world in which governance is a function being provided by a wide variety of actors (e.g., Risse, Levi-Faur, Hale, de Renzio). 

These criticisms are quite correct if my original intention had been to write a paper broadly describing present-day understandings of the term “governance,” as I suppose was implied by the title of the paper.  But the narrowing of focus in these respects was very deliberate on my part, for reasons that were poorly or incompletely articulated on my part.  So let me proceed to do that now.

This working paper arose out of a project that I have been running at Stanford for the past year entitled the Governance Project.  Its purpose was to develop an empirical measure of the quality of government that would deliberately exclude democracy, focusing on the state’s ability deliver services and carry out policies.  Such a measure would allow one to compare an authoritarian regime like China with a democratic one like the United States, and would allow us to then address the question of whether the presence or absence of democracy affected the quality of government.  Taking this approach did not reflect a view on my part that democracy was not good thing in itself, or that I somehow want to engage in “value-free” social science.  But the relationship of democracy to state performance is one that ought to be evaluated empirically, rather than assuming definitionally that democracy is an intrinsic part of something called “good governance.”  Not surprisingly, it was the commentators from Asia (Sheng, Mahbubani, Lan Xue) who picked up on the fact that the real target of this exercise was better evaluation of governance in China.

I also deliberately wanted the measure to focus on implementation rather than substantive policy.  Having worked in and around government and public policy institutions my whole career, I’ve come to see how high-level public policy gets far more prestige, resources, and attention than does old-fashioned public administration.  Indeed, simply uttering the words “public administration” aloud will cause students to fall asleep and funders to race to the exits.

Yet problems of implementation are at the root of poor economic and social outcomes all over the world.  Governments routinely fail to deliver basic services like education, health, security, macroeconomic stability, or to fail to deliver them in a timely, impartial, and cost-effective manner.  This is as true of the United States as of any developing country.  These are valence objectives agreed to by virtually everyone, yet beyond the capacity of very many states to achieve.

This is why I wanted to focus specifically on the performance of states.  Government-like services are of course performed today by a wide variety of actors outside the state.  Over the past generation there has been a broad effort to bypass dysfunctional states and create parallel service delivery mechanisms.  Many failed states like Haiti, Afghanistan, and Somalia are in effect being “governed” by international actors (donor agencies, NGOs, and the like), while organizations like the Global Fund have taken over health functions from state ministries all over Africa.  There has been a broad effort in developed countries to privatize state functions, develop public-private partnerships, and outsource many activities, including core security functions, to private contractors or NGOs.

These initiatives are understandable and many are here to stay for good.  But many of them are second-best solutions undertaken because we have given up the effort to reform the state itself.  It remains the case that the provision of basic public goods is something best performed by well-functioning states, and unless we figure out how to fix the public sector, we will be left with band-aid solutions.  One of the reasons that the Chinese-influenced parts of East Asia have had a big leg up in terms of development outcomes is their inheritance of Chinese traditions of stateness.  China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have been able to take a functioning state for granted in a way that countries in other regions could not.

Along these lines, I am a bit disappointed that more commentators didn’t take on the challenge in my piece to help think through the issue of bureaucratic autonomy as a key factor in state performance.  Autonomy was the factor that links poor performance in low-income countries to that in high-capacity, high-income ones:  generally speaking, the former have too much, and the latter have too little.  However, levels of autonomy vary tremendously within individual countries.  In the United States, the Federal Reserve, DARPA, the Centers for Disease Control, and a select few agencies are delegated enormous discretion and generally function at a very high level.  Others, like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Pentagon when procuring big-ticket items are subject to crippling mandates that undermine their performance.  I believe we need to abandon single-country aggregate numbers in favor of disaggregated measures, if not by individual agency, then at least by sector.

This then raises the question of how to assess the level of autonomy in a particular government institution.  I argued that the degree of autonomy was determined by the number and nature of mandates placed on a bureaucracy by the political principal.  If this is a correct understanding, then we need measure not just the number of mandates, but their coherence, how detailed they are, what kinds of functions they prescribe, and the like.  There’s no mechanical way of doing this.  Could we begin by assessing statutory mandates?  Could we set up structured interviews or surveys of officials?  I would like to know if anyone has thought this through more systematically, because it is my intention to carry out such a data-gathering effort in China as part of the Governance Project.

Christopher Pollitt asked the question, for what purpose are these measures being devised?  The central issue I would like to understand is the degree to which good state performance can be divorced from democratic procedures.  The prevailing orthodoxy in much of the development community is that they are tightly linked:  greater transparency and accountability are the quickest route to reducing corruption and improving service delivery.  However, we know also that many democracies encourage clientelism, are captured by various elites or interest groups, and consequently have states that perform poorly in terms of service delivery and enforcement.  We also know that a number of authoritarian countries have achieved impressive outcomes in terms of economic growth and improved social indicators.  At the moment there is no sophisticated theory linking democracy and state performance.  Peter Evans began a discussion of this in his book Embedded Autonomy, but political science has wandered off in other less helpful directions since then.  It is my hypothesis that bureaucratic autonomy (or the precise manner in which authority is delegated from the political principal to the bureaucratic agent) is the key to this relationship.  But we can’t know this unless we have a better empirical means of measuring, or at least categorizing, autonomy.  (I will be discussing all of these issues at much greater length in the forthcoming second volume of Political Order.)

None of this is meant to be a defense of the Chinese or Singaporean models.  Kishore Mahbubani’s assertion that the high quality of Chinese governance is evident from its outputs can be taken seriously only if aggregate economic growth is the sole index of success.  If one scratches below the surface, there are huge deficits in environmental protection, food safety, security of property rights, and a host of other areas that Chinese citizens care about.  The economic model itself is unsustainable and heading for a major crisis as China tries to move from middle- to high-income status.  As I tried to indicate in my paper, China is on the downward-sloping right-hand side of the inverted-U relating bureaucratic autonomy to government performance.  It needs to reign in the autonomy of its party-state through an expanding rule of law and, ultimately, democratic accountability.  The latter is necessary not just as a normative or intrinsic good, but for the sake of good government performance.  If China doesn’t do this, it will not be able to guarantee continuing social and political stability.  I don’t think the “Asian mind” is so impenetrable as to obscure the handwriting that is on the wall.

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.  His books include The Origins of Political Order (2011) and The End of History and the Last Man (1992).

Francis Fukuyama suggests an alternative approach to measure governance which focuses on four aspects: procedural measures, capacity measures, output measures, and measures of bureaucratic autonomy. Fukuyama also argues that in order to better understand and measure governance, it needs to be separated from the concept of democracy. For him governance is about government’s ability to deliver. He also stresses upon the need to separate the ‘outcomes’ as an indicator of governance.

Fukuyama is right on three counts. First, we still need to debate ‘what governance is’ since there is very little consensus on the meaning of the term. Second, factually speaking, his argument is valid that we don’t have any proof to show that democracy and governance are correlated. And third, he is also right that the existing measures of state capacity have certain limitations. He also deals with problems of various attempts to explain and measure governance

However, his own ideas and arguments also suffer from the similar problems which he highlights in the case of the existing studies. For example, in his entire writing Fukuyama seems to be using concepts like effective government, governance, good governance, state capacity etc interchangeably. Fukuyama begins with simply defining governance but eventually switches over to the idea of ‘good governance.’

I would like to touch upon two issues in his approach. First, for Fukuyama the idea of governance begins with the notion of government. Here he loses the track of the concept of ‘governance’. Historically governance comes prior to the concept of government. Certainly the next question would be: if government came later, then who was performing the task of governance before?  As we know, it was through various social and community organizations. However, with the emergence of monarchy and more organized forms of governance including government, the idea of participation or governance was sidelined and remained undercover till the World Bank report ‘took out the jeenie from the bottle.’

Let’s talk about the second issue, separating governance from democracy. I think governance and democracy go hand in hand. Separating both is like ‘taking the soul out of the body.’ Governance cannot be defined or conceptualized without democracy. Fukuyama explains his reason for doing this. He says that it will enable us to theorize the relationship between democracy as well as governance if we separate the two concepts.

Fukuyama could be right if democracy is defined in terms of procedural, minimalist sense (though he doesn’t mention it at all but it seems implicit). Certainly, logically this is correct to say that ‘effective’ rules can be made and enforced without having regular, free and fair elections, and to deliver services e.g. China. In fact, popular demands for rights are at times seen as hostile to the objective of providing services in time. India is a good example of this scenario.

A crucial question which Fukuyama misses is: who defines the objective, and who defines services?  The answer is very categorical according to Fukuyama. It’s the government which defines them. Fukuyama goes one step ahead. According to him all these issues can be understood by applying Weberian notion of bureaucracy. So the entire debate on the government boils down to the bureaucracy on the Weberian standards. Fukuyama also seems to believe that government is ‘the’ determining institution in a state.

Ralph Miliband in his popular book The State in Capitalist Society published in 1969 used a phrase “Down with Marx and Up with Weber” to explain the increasing role of bureaucracy and decline of politics in the functioning of the advanced capitalist states. Miliband’s conclusion seems to hold true in Fukuyama’s approach to measure governance.

We have learnt from  history that leaving it to the governments or to bureaucracy to decide what is right and wrong for the citizens may have disastrous consequences. The government needs effective checks from various economic, societal and international actors. The idea of governance is rather against too much expansion of the government. It helps in determining ‘how much government is right.’

Dr. Sudhir Kumar Suthar is an Assistant Professor at Department of Political Science, BB Ambedkar University, Lucknow, India and writes on issues of governance, comparative politics and public policy. He is co-author of Comparative Politics and Crisis of Governance: The Russian Conundrum.

Cornel Ban and Daniela Gabor, Bristol Business School

Has the global economic crisis changed the International Monetary Fund — and if so, how?  These were the questions posed at a workshop held at Boston University on April 8.  The workshop was sponsored by the Boston University Center for Finance, Law and Policy and co-sponsored by Governance.  The conveners were Professors Cornel Ban and Kevin Gallagher.

The IMF has played an important role in shaping governmental responses to the crisis over the past six years.  But the crisis has also affected the IMF itself.  Scholars from twelve universities participated in the workshop, examining IMF policies on fiscal policy, debt restructuring, financial sector surveillance, capital controls, and other topics.

The workshop papers “showed that some remarkable changes did occur within the IMF,” Ban says.  In most cases, the Fund’s openness to new thinking is more obvious in its research and policy advice than in terms its loan programs.

Len Seabrooke, Copenhagen Business School

The papers also suggested that crisis has checked a tendency toward mission creep and led the IMF to narrow the scope of its loan programs, focusing on the key elements of a mainly orthodox economic policy agenda.  And they provided evidence to challenge the conventional wisdom that crisis impels governments to put aside ideological objections to working with the IMF.  The reality about the politics of dealing with the IMF appears to be more complex.

In sum, Ban says, changes in the IMF over the last six years “were too modest to suggest that an economic paradigm change is imminent.”  The papers provided reason for concern about the persistence of old habits of thought, which have appeared in some ways to hamper recovery from the crisis.

The workshop was “a fascinating and lively discussion,” Gallagher concluded.  “We expect these papers to make an important contribution to understanding about the role of the IMF during the economic crisis.”

Download the program.  See more photos from the workshop.

PROFESSOR Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, has been described as “the muse of the Asian century”. He is widely known for his famous idea, “the rise of Asia and the decline of the West”.

His full perspectives on the idea can be intensively explored in his books – The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift Of Global Power To The East, and The Great Convergence: Asia, The West And The Logic Of One World.

As an Asian youth, I am actually very receptive to his idea of the rise of Asia, since it gives us an unprecedented dose of confidence in our future.  However, Prof Mahbubani’s idea also casts a doubt in my mind: Is he too optimistic about Asia’s rise?

As a matter of fact, his argument is mainly based on the evidence that some of the major Asian emerging countries (China, India and Indonesia) have been enjoying rapid economic growth and relative success in recent decades. However, I question if Asia as a whole is also rising comprehensively and sustainably in terms of political, social and cultural power.

On March 26, The Governance journal blog published an article by Prof Mahbubani in response to American academic Francis Fukuyama’s essay, What Is Governance’.  Prof Mahbubani welcomed Professor Fukuyama’s distinction between democracy and good governance, particularly in the Asian context. As I scrutinised Prof Mahbubani’s article, I started to wonder if he was too optimistic again.

Although Prof Mahbubani mentioned in his article that “democracy is a desirable goal”, his key arguments over-emphasised democracy as just a means of governance.

This is evident from his claim: “To put it bluntly, democracy is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for good governance. And, yes, it is possible to have good governance without democracy.”

Unfortunately, this point may be easily misunderstood by the public as: democracy is regarded as dispensable or optional, so long as there is good governance.

On the contrary, I want to re-emphasise that democracy is not only a means to governance, but also an extremely critical social development goal.

In its proclamation of Independence in 1965, Singapore proposed the blueprint of constructing a nation with democracy, independence, freedom, justice, fairness, equality, welfare and well-being.

Even the People’s Republic of China, which always firmly declares “building socialism with Chinese characteristics”, clearly states its national goal of “building a prosperous, democratic and civilised socialist country” in its Constitution. Therefore, it is very obvious that even if there is good governance, democracy is still an inevitable objective to pursue.

China was cited by Prof Mahbubani to support his idea. He commented in his article that “anyone who doubts this (it is possible to have good governance without democracy) should look at the record of China’s government over the past 30 years”.

As a mainland-born Chinese, I should be very proud if China’s so-called unique development model can be considered as a sustainable paradigm of good governance.

However, Prof Mahbubani’s statement raises a pertinent question: Why should we look only at the past 30 years of China’s governance but not the past 40 or even 50 years’

Obviously, China has been enjoying fast economic growth over the past 30 years since the opening up of its economy in the late 1970s. Nonetheless, China and its people suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 and the earlier Great Leap Forward years (1958-1960).

What type of governance had existed in China during the 30 years between the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the opening up of the economy in 1978′

Yes, democracy may not necessarily ensure good governance, but in my view, it should at its minimum prevent the rise of “evil governance”.

In addition, Prof Mahbubani wrote that “no other society in human history has improved human welfare as much as the Chinese government”.

I personally agree but this judgment comes a bit too early.

It may not be reasonable to compare economic performance between developed countries and emerging countries simply in terms of the speed of growth as it is similar to comparing the growth rate between the elderly and the young.

Although the West is currently experiencing certain crises, isn’t it unfair to blame the Western model of democracy as a scapegoat? The United States has been prosperous for hundreds of years, with its democratic system as one element underpinning its success.

Perhaps China did not need democracy for the past 30 years during its initial phase of wealth creation. Nevertheless, without a functional democratic system in place in the near future to ensure equal participation from the public in the wealth allocation, China will not be able to build an inclusive society based on fairness, justice and less corruption.

Singapore is another example which Prof Mahbubani favours. His article stated: “The Singapore civil service has performed brilliantly but it has not done so because it is the most autonomous. It has done so because it has imbibed a culture which focuses the minds of civil servants on improving the livelihood of Singaporeans.”

In fact, the professor has listed the key factors of Singapore’s success as MPH, namely Meritocracy, Pragmatism and Honesty. I would never deny the importance of MPH, but it should not be taken to mean that Singapore does not require democracy.

If MPH is really sufficient for Singapore, then the public support for the ruling party in the recent elections and by-elections would have not declined continuously and significantly.

Although it is unclear what kind of democracy is best for Singapore, electorates have repeatedly used their ballots to indicate a preference for more political competition as well as greater checks and balances on the ruling government.

Asians should respect universal values such as democracy and human rights. It would not be beneficial to overly emphasise Asia’s uniqueness which may only lead to selective interpretation or even misinterpretation of democracy.

North Korea may call itself the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” but the rest of the world is left in no doubt that it is a totalitarian and Stalinist dictatorship.

Furthermore, Asia itself is facing crises. Dozens of Asian countries are still struggling with poverty; while the nuclear-armed North Korea and Iran are seeking wars.

Moreover, the simmering territorial disputes in the East China Sea and South China Sea can potentially trigger unrest in the region and impact global security.

Hopefully, most of such crises in Asia are just the exception and Prof Mahbubani’s great “Asian Dream” will not turn out to be just a beautiful mirage.

The writer, a graduate of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, is an investment analyst based in Singapore. He was born in China and became a Singapore permanent resident in 2011.