Over the past four decades, Singapore leveraged land use controls, water recycling technology, education campaigns, and catchment systems to build a system uniquely tailored to Singapore and incredibly resilient. The wide use of tools and constant adaptation to local constraints is a compelling recipe for other cities.

NISTPASS writes,

According to Noviscape, “grey collar workers” will become the fastest growing segment of the workforce in countries such as Singapore and Thailand.
While rapid declining fertility and longer life expectancy are evident in every country in the region, they are aging at different rates.
“Singapore and Thailand have already been categorized as ageing societies since the early 2000s, Cambodia and Laos both have very young populations. The rest of ASEAN member states fall somewhere between these extremes, but are catching up fast.” (pg9)

Singapore is profoundly shaped by both the Singaporean diaspora around the world, and the many diasporic communities from other countries that settle in Singapore.

According to Noviscape, July 2011, the government has recognized the power of the Singaporean diaspora and is attempting to leverage it.

According to the Asian Trends Monitoring Bulletin from October 2010, it appears as though the Southeast Asian countries with the least access to electricity uses the highest amount of energy from "combustible renewables and waste".

Thailand which shows a 99% rate of access to electricity for rural communities and 100% rate of access for urban communities gets only 18% of their energy from combustible renewables and waste.

Medical tourism is a quickly growing industry in Southeast Asia. The stigma of traveling for surgery is long gone, and now it can even be combined with a luxurious vacation. But have the potential downfalls of this growing global market been properly considered before nationally supported expansion efforts have been put into place?