I am an armchair economist regarding SG, but I would that say semiconductor manuf has been heavily subsidised by the gov't. As I understand, the "one trick" is to "get the plant built". They do whatever it takes to get the next plant built. Once built, it is very hard (economically) to stop running a semiconductor plant. This creates long-lasting, genuine economic growth for SG.

Also, their petro-chemical industry is surprisingly large for a tiny country. I'm not talking about the simple trading of crude oil and gas; I'm talking about real value add by refineries and chemical plants. Again, I am not an expert here, but I assume that the SG gov't provided handsome benefits to the global supermajors to build huge refineries and chemical plants.

Yeah the government does not disturb businesses here much. But they do heavily subsidize corporate costs. Theres a economic development board that provides lot of grants for companies. Most mncs use edb grants for setting up their initial business.

Early on in Singapores history, the government did seize a lot of land from farmers though. I believe they were compensated for it.

We also have these weird things called GLCs. China sort of copied this with their telecom industry. GLCs are corporations created by the government to handle certain things. They kind of have government level powers but corporate governances (worst of both worlds imo).