ABSTRACT
A British colony with its modern founding attributed to Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819, Singapore is a young island nation with no more than 5 decades since its independence from Britain in 1963 and from Malaysia in 1965. In this relatively short period, it has made tremendous economic progress. For example, it was ranked in 2012 as a country with among the highest GDP per capita in the world (World Bank, 2014). That same year, Mercer ranked Singapore the top Asian city with the highest quality of living, and it emerged 25th out of the 221 cities in an annual global survey (Lee, 2012). Singapore is the third most densely populated country in the world, with about 4.8 million people living in 700 square kilometres of land. It also has a diverse resident population of about 3.77 million in 2010 (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2011): ethnic Chinese form the majority (74.1%), with ethnic Malays (13.4%) and Indians (9.2%) accounting for a significant proportion of the minority.
