Chapter 1 - The Future

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The Future	55

has attracted 1,100 international companies to start up in the republic, and these now have 107,000 employees. The country's annual exports: $25 billion, with a trade surplus each year of $11 billion. Like Taiwan, Ireland's tax incentives to attract high-tech companies are matched by extensive policies to develop the skilled people to man them.23
  Finland has even a more amazing story to tell - and in many ways it is the story of one company: Nokia. Back in the 1980s, Finland's major industry was paper and pulp. Helsinki-based Nokia, the country's largest company, was known more for its rubber boots than tiny phones. "But when the economy took a nosedive in the early 1990s, Finland turned to high tech for salvation. The Government decided to put 2.9 percent of the gross domestic product into technology research and development. Companies turned to international partners to start electronic ventures, and Nokia discovered a seemingly endless market for cellphones."24 Soon Nokia was pulling in $32 billion a year from this new phenomenon, and its success fuelled Finland's technology boom. As the company grew, it also invested in science parks at universities around the country, which were funded by government-venture capital groups.Today Finland has 400 high-tech firms. It has only five million people, but nearly 2.5 million of them carry cellphones. And the land of lakes and saunas also boasts the highest number of Internet connections in Europe.
  The tiny Asian island state of Singapore provides equally important lessons. Forty years ago it was a poverty-stricken island. Twenty years ago the Government began a campaign to attract high-tech multinationals - with tax incentives, a well-educated workforce, and an amazing infrastructure program. Fired by an enormous Government-investment policy from compulsory superannuation savings, the island state's latest infrastructure project, Singapore One - worth hundreds of millions of dollars - will connect every household, school and office to the Internet by the end of 1999. And Singapore is probably doing more than any other nation to spend heavily on information technology in schools.
  But the biggest sleeping giant of all is China. After the stagnating years of Mao's cultural revolution, since 1979 it has released more people from poverty than any other society in history. In the past 20 years it has increased its economy more than 400 percent. But in many of the coastal "special economic areas" the economy has been soaring at an even higher rate. Sure the country still has big problems, but it is now racing to apply the lessons of Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

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