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This paper aims to determine the effect of Covid-19 which is currently hitting the entire world with a very high mortality rate in the world of education, especially the Islamic Education Institution in Singapore, namely the Muhammadiyah Islamic College. With a qualitative method and a literature review approach through the official website of the Singapore government, it was found that MIC took a policy to conduct online learning through zooming and changes to the student evaluation system. With the current excellent acceptance of online learning, it is hoped that an online-based international Islamic university will be built.

In the last decade, the higher education systems in Hong Kong and Singapore have experienced the processes of marketisation and corporatisation. Public universities are under constant pressures to restructure themselves to become more entrepreneurial and globally competitive. The principal goal of the article is to compare and contrast how and why governments in Hong Kong and Singapore have increasingly adopted more pro-competition policy tools, especially when indirect policy instruments have become increasingly popular in governing higher education in these East Asian Tigers. The present article also examines whether and how these Asian developmental states have really reduced their capacity in managing the public sector particularly when the "liberalising and marketising trends" are more globally driving their choices and options of policy tools.

The concept of 'complete and exclusive sovereignty as defined in international and national law remains poses challenges, especially concerning the effort of Indonesia in taking over the Flight Information Region (FIR) from the Singapore context. The management of FIR by Singapore over the Riau Islands of Indonesia was begun during the British colonial period over Malay territory, which partly became a sovereign state of Singapore in 1965. However, under the syndrome of post-colonialism Indonesia has legalized it through the 1995 bilateral agreement between Indonesia and Singapore. On the other hand, since independence, Indonesia has gradually initiated to take over the FIR until the peak time of the 2015 Presidential Instruction which explicitly orders to take over the FIR of Singapore at the latest in the next four years (2015-2019). However, until the end of 2020, there had been no significant progress. This paper critically investigates such failure within the evolving concept of 'sovereignty through the Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL) paradigm in terms of the global justice system. It is proved that the meaning of 'sovereignty in postcolonial states remains a political rhetoric as also known as 'negative sovereignty'. Hence, this paper contributes to clarifying the meaning of sovereignty in the Indonesian context, so that a new awareness arises to increase the national capacity to take over FIR from Singapore, and hopefully, the 'complete and exclusive' meaning of sovereignty can be perceived in near future, for the maximum benefit of people in Indonesia.

In response to the limited engagement with critical social science concerning the governance of Islamic banking and finance (IBF), this paper compares and conceptualizes the development and governance of IBF in Malaysia and Singapore. We argue that IBF governance in Malaysia and Singapore can be distinguished on the basis of ethnic politics, moral suasion, product demand, product innovation, and the character of state practices. Concerning the latter, we contend that the political economy of both countries can be characterized as broadly involving a 'neoliberal-developmentalism', but we nuance this by positing a transition in Malaysia from a 'semi-developmentalism' in the 1980s to what we call an 'Islamic and internationalising ordoliberalism' beginning in the 2000s. In turn, the governance of IBF in Singapore involves a combination of neoliberal developmentalism, which nonetheless also entails some form of Islamic ordoliberalism. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

This article compares budgetary reforms in Singapore and Hong Kong. Despite similar reform measures being undertaken in line with the global reform trends under new public management, it is found that such reforms per se have not fundamentally altered the institutional configuration of the respective budgetary regimes. While greater financial autonomy and flexibility have been given to departments and ministries, resulting in the central budget agency (CBA) surrendering micro-budgetary control, the latter continues to play a strategic macro-budgetary role at the governmental level. Neither have budgetary relationships moved towards control by performance as implied by the 'budgeting for results' objective. Despite their commonalities, Hong Kong has lately displayed a weaker CBA than Singapore, largely due to extra-budgetary factors rooted in their different governance and institutional contexts.

Do governments in less-democratic newly industrialized countries (NICs) bargain with their citizens? In this article we develop a game-theoretic model to show that the government may not be able to avoid bargaining in open economies such as the Asian NICs when economic conditions are less than optimal. The reason is that, in the absence of government bargaining, citizens acting rationally & strategically choose to withdraw resources such as labor or production investment from a weak economy. Under these circumstances, government bargaining to elicit resource investment is a sub-game perfect equilibrium outcome. To test the model, we analyze data on production investment in the Asian NICs of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, & Malaysia from the 1960s to the 1990s. The analysis supports the prediction of the formal model &, hence, makes three contributions to the study of this topic. First, when we relax the assumption that citizens are naive, governments in less-democratic open economies such as the Asian NICs may not be able to avoid bargaining with their citizens. Second, resource-withholding or withdrawal is an equilibrium strategy that convinces the government to bargain. Third, governments may bargain credibly even in the absence of formal constraints. 2 Tables, 3 Figures, 69 References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2005.]

"This publication is a biographical account of the founder of Singapore, Sir Stamford Raffles, through a study of the lives of his closest friends and contemporaries. Some of the personalities featured include William Brown Ramsay, John Leyden and Thomas Horsfield."--