Economy of Singapore in the context of "Tax rate"

The Four Asian Tigers (a.k.a. the Four Asian Dragons or Four Little Dragons in Chinese and Korean) are the developed Asian economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Between the early 1950s and 1990s, they underwent rapid industrialization and maintained exceptionally high growth rates of more than 7 percent a year.

By the early 21st century, these economies had developed into high-income economies, specializing in areas of competitive advantage. Hong Kong and Singapore have become leading international financial centres, whereas South Korea and Taiwan are leaders in manufacturing electronic components and devices; Taiwan now produces the most advanced semiconductor chips in the world; South Korea has also developed into a major global arms manufacturer. Large institutions have pushed to have them serve as role models for many developing countries, especially the Tiger Cub Economies of Southeast Asia.

State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises (including the processes of capital accumulation, centralized management and wage labor). The definition can also include the state dominance of corporatized government agencies (agencies organized using business-management practices) or of public companies (such as publicly listed corporations) in which the state has controlling shares. The term has been used as a pejorative by Marxists, liberals and neoliberals. However, it has also served as a programmatic label for developmentalist and neomercantilist projects in reaction toimperialism.

A state-capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts as a single huge corporation, extracting surplus value from the workforce in order to invest it in further production. This designation applies regardless of the political aims of the state, even if the state is nominally socialist. Some scholars argue that the economy of the Soviet Union and of the Eastern Bloc countries modeled after it, including Maoist China, were state capitalist systems, and Eastern and Western commentators alike assert that the current economies of China and Singapore also constitute a mixture of state-capitalism with private capitalism.

Balance of trade is the difference between the monetary value of a nation's exports and imports of goods over a certain time period. Sometimes, trade in services is also included in the balance of trade but the official IMF definition only considers goods. The balance of trade measures a flow variable of exports and imports over a given period of time. The notion of the balance of trade does not mean that exports and imports are "in balance" with each other.

If a country exports a greater value than it imports, it has a trade surplus or positive trade balance, and conversely, if a country imports a greater value than it exports, it has a trade deficit or negative trade balance. As of 2016, about 60 out of 200 countries have a trade surplus. The world's largest trade surpluses are held by China ($823 billion), Germany ($226 billion), and Singapore ($154 billion), while the largest trade deficits are held by the United States ($1.15 trillion), United Kingdom ($271 billion), and India ($241 billion).