At a joint news conference in Malacañang, the President asked Lee, the son of the famously frank founder Lee Kuan Yew, to share Singapore's "best practices" in governance. Lee, proving himself every inch his father's son, needed no further prodding.

He spoke about how Singapore "inherited a clean system" from the British, and how the party in power since independence "kept it clean." He also said that the island-state took its anti-corruption drive seriously. "Secondly, we established a mechanism to make sure that if anybody was corrupt, [he] would be found out, investigated and punished."

Candid; revealing about their implied contrast with Philippine experience; but resolutely conventional. What Lee offered was the stingiest kind of truth: explanations that did not explain, or at least did not explain enough. Other ex-outposts of the British empire, for instance, are also heirs of the British genius for administration; how many have risen to Singapore's level of success? Anti-corruption campaigns are not exactly China's strongest suit, but for almost two decades it has remained the world's fastest- growing economy.

There must be more, or at least something more specific to Singapore, in the Singapore experience. One answer lies in Lee's third "best practice."

At the joint news conference, Lee paid special attention to the issue of government wages. "If we don't pay [a public official] proper wages, even at the working level, he can't earn a living for himself and for his family." By "proper," he didn't mean merely the concept of a living wage, but a compensation package that compares favorably with international standards.

"So we made a virtue of paying our civil servants competitively. We require them to perform, but our philosophy is, Whatever [we pay] in wages is well worth the performance we get from them."

The whole idea is to tempt the most talented to make a career out of public service, and to pay them well enough to make corruption a non- issue.

Singapore has certainly taken this idea to heart. In 2000, for instance, the salary of Singapore's premier was pegged at US$1.1 million-five times that of the President of the United States, the chief executive of the world's largest economy. The salary of a Cabinet minister ranged from US$655,000 to US$820,000; at the lower end of the scale, the pay was already four times the salary of a US Cabinet secretary.

We understand that there has been at least one salary increase in the four years since. And we also realize that not all Singaporeans are happy with this state of affairs, especially when the salary of a high government official is compared with that of the ordinary citizen.

But there is no doubt that the Singapore success trajectory owes much of its momentum to this particular virtue.

Where a becoming silence would have been the best response to Lee's short discourse, the President reacted defensively. "With regard to the high pay of public servants, that is also my dream. But it's difficult to do that right now given our budget deficit. That's why we need to do fiscal reform so that we can afford a better-paid bureaucracy."

But is it merely a matter of fiscal reform? We think the deficit is being made a convenient scapegoat for all sorts of national sins. If, for the sake of argument, we imagine a time when the deficit has been reduced to practically zero, do we see the government staffed by higher-paid public servants?

The answer, as best as we can tell, is: No, not necessarily. Why is this so? Because the issue of high, competitive government wages is not reducible to fiscal reform, dire as that need is. The issue is cultural or, to be more precise, attitudinal.

Many Filipinos see public service as a reward in itself; the matter of compensation is at best a secondary consideration. We may see in this other-worldly attitude the triumph of idealism, but in the real world the link between low government wages and rampant government corruption is as solid as a ball-and-chain.

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