A Singapore scholar said Thursday that both the Singapore and Chinese governments had responded well to the global financial crisis.

Professor Neo Boon Siong, of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP) of National University of Singapore, said, "In dealing with global financial crisis, both governments follow market economy principles, but are not shy of intervention."

Both governments were intelligent about when and how to intervene in the market, he told a symposium held by the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University.

Since the outbreak of global financial crisis in late 2008, the Singaporean government had designed and implemented a resilience package to address recession, including deposit guarantees to individuals and enterprises, stimulating bank lending, and employment credits that encouraged businesses to preserve jobs, said Prof. Neo, who is also the Director of the Asia Competitiveness Institute of the LKYSPP.

The Chinese government had formed a 4-trillion-yuan economic stimulus package to boost infrastructure construction, subsidize home appliance purchases, and encourage banks to loan to small and medium-sized businesses.

Neo said both countries valued social harmony and stability, and paid great attention to addressing social issues, such as public housing, medical insurance and old-age pensions.

He said Singapore had built a unique public housing system and more than 80 percent of Singporeans had ownership of their homes. Sinapore's Central Provident Fund mechanism assisted in housing, medical insurance and education.

He said the Chinese government's social reforms included low-income housing and massive educational and medical reforms.

"The difference is Singapore is a small country, while China is big and complex. It would be faster and easier for the Singaporean government to design and implement policies, while market intervention policies take a longer time to work in China," he said.

However, Singapore's domestic market was limited, while China had great potential to boost its domestic market.

He said that as globalization deepened, government needed to respond to challenges and changes more rapidly and rationally.

In his book "Dynamic Governance: Embedding Culture, Capabilities and Change in Singapore", published in English and Chinese, he identified and conceptualized three institutional capabilities for dynamic governance: the capability to think ahead to anticipate and prepare for the future; the capacity to think again to evaluate past and present practices for continued relevance and improvement; and the capability to think across boundaries to learn from others and to work collaboratively in a whole-government approach to handle complex challenges.

The School of Public Policy and Management of Tsinghua University held a book launch ceremony for the Chinese version of this book Thursday.

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