Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 108-109).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-94). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

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This thesis will revisit Michel Foucault's original arguments on the ‘urban problem’ and the concomitant question of circulation, which I contend has been disassociated from more general renderings of his concept of governmentality. Throughout the 1970s, and particularly during his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault would regularly return to the problem of urban circulation; how it has been conceived, calculated and distributed. Foucault would ponder the ways that material infrastructures have canalised people and resources, and naturalised their complex coexistence, in the interests of urban economic restructuring and state aggrandisement. Here, the ‘question of water’ was not only incidental to Foucault’s analytics of government but absolutely integral. Indeed, according to Foucault, whether flowing through rivers, canals, pipes, pumps, sewers or fountains, or stagnating in swamps, marshes and ditches, water has required the especial attention of town planners attempting to optimise the contentious process of urbanisation. Using Singapore as a case study, I will consider how the circulation of water has been administered under the three technologies of power identified by Foucault, with the greater emphasis put on discipline and security. The overarching argument will be that the modern state was consolidated and subsequently decentralised through the material configuration of drainage infrastructure, reservoirs and distribution systems, where governmental programmes have been co-produced with the technological networks of water circulation. Although disciplinary techniques had initially been found effective in terms of pollution control and flood alleviation, counterproductive consequences of concrete modernism quickly emerged requiring a greater uptake of security mechanisms, where government would be increasingly exercised through practices of exposure rather than enclosure. Mosquitoes were now thriving in the subterranean network of drains, valuable land was being wastefully converted into dormant storm canals, whilst people had become socially and emotionally disconnected from water. Released and revalorised, water now serves as a mobile technology of government which can penetrate and pervade the urban form and the everyday life of its inhabitants, centrifugally unleashing the potency of water flows and human desire whilst facilitating Singapore’s transformation into a global city. With its methodological nominalism and commitment to concrete practices, I argue that once reoriented around the urban problem, Foucault’s analytics can advance environmental politics debates by demonstrating that government is a mundanely material process orchestrated through the everyday infrastructure of water management. In so doing, I also shift the emphasis from the urbanisation of nature to the naturalisation of the urban, of circulation and the art of government itself.

This thesis examines the levels of restrictive foreign investment regulatory policies of Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore from 1970 to 1980. The study seeks to explain why their policies varied. It presents a descriptive comparison of each country's policies restricting foreign investment. This discussion deals with general quantitative limits on foreign ownership, restrictions on certain economic sectors, restrictions on the operations of foreign-owned corporations, and the use of government-owned corporations as instruments of control over foreign investment. Based on the comparison, the study concludes that Malaysia placed greater restrictions on foreign investment than Thailand or Singapore. It is argued that differences in the domestic political and economic settings of Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore explain Malaysia's greater restrictiveness. The thesis examines each state's past experience with a colonial power, economic strategies of the political elites, domestic political pressures, and the presence of ethnic minorities. It also looks at such contributing factors as the size of the natural resource sector, the prevalence of industries with old technology, and the level of foreign ownership of industry in each country. This thesis concludes that Malaysia placed more restrictions than Thailand or Singapore because it had a very different domestic setting: an economically-dominant ethnic minority, domestic pressure for restrictions, and a nationalistic and interventionist economic strategy. Taken together, these differences explain Malaysia's greater restrictions on foreign investment. Of the explanatory variables, ethnic factors are the most important. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

The purpose of this study is to evaluate if FDI can be used as a proverbial ‘another arrow in the quiver’ for boosting economic growth. The research topic at hand asks if a positive regression can be observed between the employment of external market forces, specifically FDI, and economic growth. The study covers Singapore and South Korea during the period 1972-2019. The theoretical framework includes Solow’s exogenous growth theory, Romer’s endogenous growth theory and the OLI-theory. These theories provide the mechanism and context which explains how FDI can affect an economy, these include capital accumulation and non-rivalising ideas. The data has been tested to see if it complies with the classical assumption of linear regression. The analysis is based on multiple variable regression where a new independent variable is presented for each new regression that is made. The results show that there is no statistically significant coefficient in the regression model between FDI-inflow and economic growth in both countries during the specified time period. This result occurred because the FDI variable for the multiple regressions for each country usually does not show a statistically significant result. This means that the coefficient values presented in the regressions cannot be interpreted as facts because they do not reach the confidence interval below 5% to be seen as trustworthy results.

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Yes / Coral reefs are important ecosystems that not only provide shelter and breeding ground for many marine species, but can also control of carbon dioxide level in ocean and act as coastal protection mechanism. Reduction of coral reefs at Singapore coastal waters (SCW) region remains as an important study to identify the environmental impact from its busy industrial activities especially at the surrounding of Jurong Island in the south. This kind of study at SCW was often being related to issues such as turbidity, sedimentation, pollutant transport (from industry activities) effects in literatures, but seldom investigated from the thermal change aspect. In this paper, a computational model was constructed using the Delft3D hydrodynamic module to produce wave simulations on sea regions surrounding Singapore Island. The complicated semi-diurnal and diurnal tidal wave events experienced by SCW were simulated for 2 weeks duration and compared to the Admiralty measured data. To simulate the thermal mapping at the south Singapore coastal waters (SSCW) region, we first adapted a conversion of industrial to thermal discharge; then from the discharge affected area a thermal map was further computed to compare with the measured coral map. The outcomes show that the proposed novel thermal modelling approach has quite precisely simulated the coral map at SSCW, with the condition that the near-field thermal sources are considered (with the coverage area in the limit of 20 km × 20 km). / The author also acknowledges the support of Nazarbayev University’s (Kazakhstan) research seed grant no. KF-12/6 for purchasing and providing the Delft3D software used in this study (which the author is the principal investigator of the grant)