With tight control over media, restrictions on freedom of association and other basic freedoms, and the creative redrawing of electoral districts to favor its candidates, the PAP had little to worry about because Singapore is effectively a one-party state. Nonetheless, in the run-up to the election the PAP government launched a US$2.7 billion "give-back" of public funds to entice an electorate that has seen Singapore's economic "miracle" lose much of its luster of late.

Singapore's ruling myth goes something like this: Singapore's post-independence story has been a money-making miracle, and the miracle-maker is the PAP led by Lee Kuan Yew.

However, sift out the hubris and brush away the PR puff, what remains is an economic structure that is quite explicable and utterly lacking in creative vitality. In fact, questions about the sustainability of an economic system that subjugates its people rather than serves them, and exploits rather than inspires, are beginning to surface.

Singapore's economy was built on investment by multinational companies. Foreign factories in Singapore receive very generous tax incentives and the use of a low-paid, "highly-disciplined" work force.

To make certain that the locals go along with all this, civil society in general and the labor movement in particular has been repressed. Singapore's Internal Security Act enables the ruling party to arrest any citizen at the government's pleasure and detain them at the government's leisure. Singaporeans have little access to open information. The country is kept on a strict diet of intellect-numbing government pronouncements lacking critical analysis, offered by a compliant mass media kept on very short leashes.

With these conditions in place, a vast infusion of foreign capital flowed into the city-state. But the cream of workers' incomes is skimmed off through a regimen of taxes, levies and forced savings that are used by the government to finance its own forays into the world of business.

This partnership between foreign multinationals and Singapore's government has raised the living standards of the majority but masks a deleterious long-term problem for Singapore's economy. With a work force conditioned more to conform than to reform, economic growth is fueled by increases in capital investment but without a corresponding increase in quality output from worker efficiency. Such an economy will have tremendous difficulty in sustaining itself over time.

This lesson seems lost on Singapore's government. It has signed or is negotiating free-trade agreements with a list of countries, including the US, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Yet free trade benefits people most when societies are free as well. When governments and corporations in developed countries strike trade deals with authoritarian regimes such as Singapore's -- without taking into account the problems faced by a people deprived of their civil and political rights -- they encourage exploitation and moral corruption.

Singapore is a case in point. Between 1998 and 1999, the average household monthly income of the poorest 10 percent of the population slumped by nearly 50 percent, from US$258 to US$133, whereas for the richest 10 percent it increased 2.6 percent, according to the Singapore Straits Times. A year later, the monthly incomes of the top 10 percent rose a further 8.8 percent and for the bottom 10 percent plunged a further 54 percent, to US$61 per month.

Among 59 countries surveyed by the Global Competitiveness Report 1999, the median wage of workers in Singapore, adjusted for productivity, ranked 56th. Only workers in Russia, Ukraine and Ecuador fared worse. All this is in a city ranked as one of the most expensive in the world.

The Singaporean working poor's plight is compounded by the repression of the independent labor movement. Following the mass arrest of trade union leaders in 1963, the government set up the pliant National Trade Unions Congress (NTUC). In 1966, it outlawed strikes. In 1968, it introduced the Employment Act, which, among other regulations, increased working hours and decreased employee benefits.

The Industrial Relations Act forbids unions from intervening in employment issues, including promotions, transfers, dismissals and retrenchments. In the late 1970s, the government rewrote the NTUC charter to enable non-members to assume key posts in the organization.

Today, a PAP Cabinet minister heads the NTUC and its leadership includes PAP parliamentarians and other party members. Singapore's PAP government sits squarely among Asia's undemocratic regimes. Whether it is in the political or economic arena, Singaporeans have little access to crucial information regarding -- and little say in -- decisions that affect their lives. Under a government that brooks no dissent or challenge to its authority, Singaporeans are left with a system that encourages economic growth at the citizen's expense.

Despite the undemocratic nature of the PAP government, Western companies continue to pour in investment that taps Singapore's efficient and subjugated work force. But the architects and operators of free-market systems must not only be competent to handle problems arising from the politics of globalization, they must also be fully committed to the globalization of politics. In Singapore, if nothing is done to rectify the jarring dissonance between global economics and local politics, a collision between the people and the government is a question of when, not if.

Now re-elected, the PAP will continue to deprive Singaporeans of their civil and political rights. It will also propagate the false notion that there is no alternative to the prevailing economic arrangements. Yet there is nothing inevitable about Singapore's economic course. The alternatives lie in the principles of democracy. Democracy for its own sake is a system worthy of attainment. In Singapore, it will also ensure that economic development improves the quality of life for all, not only for the country's elite.

Chee Soon Juan is the secretary-general of the Singapore Democratic Party.

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