Business thinking has to change. The best startup success area in the world by far is Silicon Valley - very expensive rentals, very high taxes (USA + California), very high health care costs (USA health care costs nearly double every other rich country - much more than double Singapore), very high labor costs. They are successful in spite of this. Singapore's costs have risen greatly in the last 30 years. The challenges of startups that provide great paying jobs for extremely high paid workers (needed to be rich in current Singapore or San Francisco) is very different from what is needed 30 years ago in Singapore. Singapore is doing well actually, but being very successful at creating businesses that succeed with very high costs is very hard (much harder than being successful at what Singapore did 50 and 30 years ago - basically being competent and not having government screw everything up, which is pretty much what most other places have to deal with).
If Iskandar is successful, they will much more quickly run into the challenges Singapore faces now. Costs is Iskandar will soar quickly if success approaches even 75% of the economic success Singapore achieved by 2010. Iskandar doing well in the next 10-15 years really should not be hard - basically you have to be significantly less bad than most governments (which shouldn't be hard). If that happens the next 10-15 years are much harder to keep improving economic gains (you get the easy wins first then the hard stuff starts - you have to be doing tons of things very well, eduction, medical care, urban planing, government ethics [limited corruption], government executing well, long term planing, financial regulation...). Singapore had the same thing, though with longer time scales. Keeping a high earning economy (like Singapore's now) is much harder, you have to keep doing nearly all those things very well or you quickly stagnate or start going backward).
Iskandar provides an "escape valve" for costs (like the suburbs of Manhattan) but lots of other stuff has to go well too. I think Singapore is failing at managing population growth. I think trying to grow as much as they have has been a mistake and they compounded it with other planning mistakes (MRT, for example).
But there really are very few countries situated more favorably for the next 50 years. Malaysia is in good shape too, but is still riskier, they need more success to build a cushion of economic wealth that allows countries to absorb shocks and mistakes. Yes, Singapore and Malaysia have some issues, but everywhere has issues and I don't think anywhere has fewer, or less challenging, issues facing them. Other countries that are likely in pretty good shape include Norway, Sweden, Canada and some others (but there are plenty of arguments for placing Singapore very highly in comparison). The USA has lots of strengths (probably more than any country) they also have some pretty big challenges (near the top of countries that are not complete basket-cases and I think certainly the top of all rich country) still they are in the group with the best prospects in my opinion. China has big potential and huge challenges. Japan has very big demographic and financial challenges. Germany, Korea... have potential but also challenges. And that repeats for tons of countries though you also get lots with many more challenges than good opportunities.
Except for the crime rates, the rest are okay. Nevermind, I can wait for another 30+ years for Malaysia to get better and if not there are Thailand (choice #2) and other countries to consider for my retirement :p
