If the south-centre represents where the banks are in Singapore, then the west represents where the brawn is.

If the south-centre represents Singapore's cultural and administrative history, then the west represents its industrial history.

As we are reminded often enough, Singapore has no natural resources of her own, thus we are dependent on imports from world markets. Up till the late 1950s, Singapore was mainly an entrepôt linking its resource-rich hinterland (South-East Asia) to the rest of the world.

In the 1959 General Election, the Peoples' Action Party came to power, winning forty-three out of fifty-one seats. Almost immediately, there were two types of challenges the new government had to address.

First were external challenges. Our neighbours, caught up by post-war nationalism, initiated direct trading instead, thus bypassing Singapore (for example, East Malaysia started trading directly with West Malaysia, and Indonesia gave us the very cold shoulder during Sukarno's Konfrontasi, (1963 -1966). These countries set up import tariffs to protect their fledgling domestic industries from external competition.

As if this was not bad enough, there were the internal challenges to tackle. Unemployment was rising as entrepôt was not a labour intensive industry - we were just a transit and bunkering port for raw materials.

In 1960, there were an estimated sixty thousand unemployed. The post-Japanese-Occupation baby-boomers were also beginning to enter the job market at around this time.

In the light of all this, the Economic Development Board (EDB) was set up in 1961 to formulate and implement a programme of rapid industrialization in order to diversify the economy; to seek out and evaluate new investment opportunities; and to assist and support industrial programmes through capital assistance and industrial training grants.

Part 2: Jurong can't be wrong
Part 3: The Swinging Seventies

Reproduced with permission from the site formerly known as 'No Place Like Home', © Kenneth Y T Lim 1995-9