A City all Dressed Up

She breezes past Prada Paragon along Orchard; he sits in his taxi waiting for the lights to turn green; she sits patiently in the bus waiting for her stop...

I wonder what does it mean to them, to my fellow Singaporeans, to be having the world's powerful leaders arrive in Singapore next week for the APEC meetings. I look down at the list in my folder; Hu Jintao, Bill Clinton, Barack. And I do wonder.

From where I am in public service, peoples are mobilised for APEC, sleep lost, efficiencies tested, personal lives sacrificed. Such is the scale that it makes you wonder if its such a big deal to the rest of the island. Cynics would likely have a quick answer to that.

From a very heavy topline point of view, these meetings means building Singapore's reputation as a global city worthy of the most valuable investments round the world. The man on the street must have heard this over and over again, yet the cabbies, bastion of society's cynics, would scoff at this topline view. Whilst I really believe the truth behind this topline, I do empathise at the cynicism at the street level. The oft-quoted mechanism in which how such topline benefits the masses is 'trickle-down'. Whilst I may be conservative on such an explanation, I am quite clear, in my view, that if Singapore doesn't put itself through such fuss for such meetings, she will lose her place in this cruel world economy.

It is simple mercantilistic economics; if you don't take it, your neighbour will. In a world economy so interconnected, the entire globe is your neighbourhood with both capable and blood-thristy neighbours. So in my view its not so much an issue of 'how much' trickle down APEC creates, but rather if we don't do this there won't be any trickle-down to even talk about.

Even with this explanation, cynics may still shake their heads; the amount of money the government spent on APEC could have been better spent through handouts to the masses. In the end, 'better' can be subjective and we can go on in circles. Yet I stick with my view, until convinced otherwise, simply because of the kind of competition I see Singapore faces in the global economy; if we don't keep up, we will be eating the dirt of our competitors that are today behind us.

I heard a bunch of friends chat about Obama's private Airforce One jet at the kopitiam the other day. To them, that was what APEC was largely about. But I'm hoping that there are also others who know how crucial these meetings are for Asia, for Obama's administration and US-Asean ties.

Whilst all those lofty ideas are interesting to me, right now, APEC means still sitting here at 10pm on a Sunday and still working. So for all the grand ideas, APEC means sweating in a business shirt and cufflinks on a Sunday night. Great.