SINGAPORE—Walk the streets of Singapore and you may think you’re in the world’s most modern country. But Singaporeans you’re pacing alongside who wish to speak freely about their country might not feel that way.“In the entire world,” Fareed Zakaria has written, “there is only one country that has reached a Western level of economic development and is still not a fully functioning democracy—Singapore.”
This is especially the case with regard to press freedom. This wealthy island nation ranked twenty-third out of 182 countries in the 2007 UN Human Development Index, and has the seventh-highest GDP per capita (around $50,000 a year) and the thirteenth highest life expectancy in the world (80.2 years). Full Story
