Emulating the Celtic Tiger? A comparison of the software industries of Singapore and Ireland

This article explores parallels between the economic development strategies of Ireland and Singapore through a study of the software sector. My centra l argument is that Singapore's embryonic software industry can learn import ant lessons from Ireland, which now exports over US$6 billion worth of prod ucts annually. Ireland's success has been achieved by attracting two forms of export-oriented foreign direct investment that are increasingly importan t due to globalisation trends in the software industry: software developmen t centres, and software product manufacturing and localisation (translation and local adaptation) plants. Ireland has benefited from its position on t he periphery of Western Europe, one of the largest software markets in the world, to emerge as a key production location for US transnational corporat ions. Singapore is perhaps now poised, with a similar range of financial, l abour market and infrastructural attributes as Ireland, to benefit from rap id growth in the Asia-Pacific software market. Three corporate case studies from Singapore are used to illustrate this argument.