Singapore’s Responses to the COVID-19 Outbreak: A Critical Assessment

Abstract

This article reviews how Singapore has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, from late-January to early May, 2020, through the three-phase approach to “learning”: in-between learning, trial-and-error learning, and contingency learning. Given its unique political system dominated by the People’s Action Party (PAP) and bureaucratic culture, the Singapore government has progressively implemented numerous control measures including strict travel bans, contact tracing, “Circuit Breaker,” compulsory mask-wearing, and social distancing policies, along with financial relief to businesses and workers, in a very top-down fashion. Although the health and treatment issues of foreign migrant workers in dormitories continue to be the subject of ongoing debate among many scholars, it should be noted that the mortality rate in Singapore still remains very low compared to that of many other countries. Singapore’s case points to an important lesson that learning-driven coordinated strategic approaches matter for effective crisis management in the long term.

Public Trust in Government and Compliance with Policy during COVID-19 Pandemic: Empirical Evidence from Vietnam

“… H2c If people trust the government, they will be more likely to support government’s anti-epidemic solutions. Hypothesis 2 Successful control of past pandemics such as SARS, H1N1 influenza and the ongoing the COVID-19 pandemic has been attributed to public cooperation with government’s anti-epidemic policies and regulations (Abdullah & Kim, 2020 ; Deurenberg-Yap, et al, 2005 ; Prati et al, 2011 ). Saechang, et al ( 2021 ) pointed out that public trust is positively correlated to people’s compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

Performative Control and Rhetoric in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Response to COVID-19

“…This was a historic move. The four-tier alert level system shown in Figure 1, similar to Singapore's Disease Outbreak Response System Condition model, was announced on 21 March as the Government's control framework based on the spread and severity of the virus, and the country was placed at Alert Level 2 (Abdullah and Kim, 2020). The immediate elevation of the country to Alert Level 2 indicated not only that the Government was not wary of performing control via immediately implementing an increased alert level, but also that the virus had already broken control of the barriers set up days and weeks earlier to prevent its spread.…”

What do we know about business and economics research during COVID-19: a bibliometric review

“…In general, most governments followed the same actions to combat the pandemic and reduce the cost of human life. To defeat the current outbreak, a preventive set of procedures are undertaken, such as severe travel limitation and restriction; impose lockdown, indirect and direct surveillance, mandatory mask-wearing, and social distancing procedures (Abdullah & Kim, 2020;Ghosh, 2020;Kim, 2020;Maher et al, 2020;Trivedi, 2020).…”

“…Recent literature primarily focused on government responses towards the pandemic (Abdullah & Kim, 2020;Ashraf, 2020;Dong & Lu, 2020;Ghosh, 2020), supply chain management (Ivanov, 2020b(Ivanov, , 2020aKer & Cardwell, 2020), financial markets reaction (Mirza et al, 2020a;Rizvi et al, 2020;Salisu et al, 2020;Sharif et al, 2020) tourism management (Choe et al, 2021;Haywood, 2020;Qiu et al, 2020;S€ onmez et al, 2020;Williams, 2021). Albeit the literature is in its early stage but quickly growing, therefore it has become imperative to synthesize the overall literature related to COVID-19 in the context of business, economics and management.…”