But what if the way we think about paying our leaders is all wrong? What if giving them more money resulted in less corruption, higher public trust and better government all round? There’s some evidence, from Singapore, that it does.

Last year, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong took home $1.6 million. That’s almost four times more than the U.S. president makes and four times as much as Australia’s prime minister, the highest-paid leader in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development last year. A Singaporean minister’s salary in 2018 was $800,000. Civil servants, too, are very well paid by international standards; a career in the bureaucracy is regarded as so secure, it’s sometimes called an “iron rice bowl.” And on almost every metric, Singapore is thriving. It ranks first in the World Bank’s most recent Government Effectiveness index; the Corruption Perceptions Index gives it an 85 out of 100, whereas the United States is at only 71; and Singapore comes in second, just after the United States, in the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Index.

These indicators are all the more impressive considering that, at its founding in 1965, Singapore had very few natural resources. It is often talked about as a place where pragmatism has triumphed over ideology, where big, decisive moves were made out of necessity from the beginning in order to attract foreign capital. One of those moves was ensuring that Singapore’s public service was technocratic, not political. In a small country—the population hovers around 5 million today—this meant making government competitive with business as a career path.

A career in the bureaucracy is regarded as so secure, it’s sometimes called an “iron rice bowl.”

Government salaries in Singapore have been informally benchmarked to the private sector since the country’s founding. Dramatic reforms in 1994 codified the high salaries seen today. Salaries for ministers are based on those in professions they could have pursued: banking, accounting, engineering, the law. Still, these salaries do not fully match the private sector, “to reflect the ethos of sacrifice that political service involves,” as a 2012 government white paper affirming the policy put it. (This public service discount amounts to 40 percent less than the median income of the top 1,000 Singaporean civilian wage-earners.)

There are also annual bonuses. A “national bonus” given to the prime minister and the cabinet is based on a few factors, including the real median income growth rate and the unemployment rate, which is currently 2.2 percent. From 2013 to 2017, each year’s payout represented an additional three to five months’ salary. Ministers also receive a performance bonus determined by the prime minister. Because the prime minister doesn’t have anyone who can grade him—there’s a president, but her role is largely custodial and does not involve setting policy—he doesn’t get one.

While the bonus is derived from a complicated formula, the salary itself is a simple proposition, unencumbered by what the Singaporeans refer to, dismissively, as “perks.” The prime minister is given a car and driver, and that’s it—unlike the American president, who receives a $19,000 entertainment allowance, a big house and a pension, among other goodies. (There is an official state residence in Singapore, but it’s used only for functions.)

The no-perks policy has been essential in building trust between politicians and the people, says Lutfey Siddiqi, a visiting professor in practice at the London School of Economics’ IDEAS think tank and an adjunct professor in risk management at the National University of Singapore. “The structure of pay is very simple so that nothing can be hidden or obfuscated,” he says. Do the people ever get annoyed about high salaries for politicians, though? Not really, says Siddiqi, a longtime resident: “As long as the social contract keeps working, there is not that resentment you see in other places.”

Do higher government salaries actually pay off for Singaporean citizens? Paying public servants a competitive wage has been intrinsic to the country’s economic transformation, argues Marie dela Rama, a lecturer in management at the University of Technology, Sydney, whose research interests include the corporate governance of family business groups in Asia. “High salaries are part of the meritocratic civil service culture where talent is rewarded, not underappreciated,” she says. Dela Rama’s research has found that a political culture—good or bad—trickles down from the top. “If senior leaders emphasize transparent, accountable and trustworthy actions, then the acceptable scope for bribery and other malfeasance is narrowed,” she wrote in a recent co-authored paper about corruption in the Asia-Pacific region.

Still, a direct correlation between higher salaries and better governance is less well established. In the private sector, paying CEOs millions of dollars is often justified as a powerful incentive for good performance. But even economists, famously hardheaded, like to talk about politics as a distinct career path—a calling, not subject to the market’s invisible hand. Renee Bowen, an economist at Stanford, and Cecilia Mo, a political scientist who is now at the University of California, Berkeley, released a paper in 2016 finding that in states where governors earn more money, the minimum wage tends to be higher and corporations tend to contribute a higher share of overall state tax revenue. The data was limited though—the paper, “The Voter’s Blunt Tool,” was mostly theoretical. (Bowen and Mo used game theory to argue that when representatives are paid more, they’re more invested in keeping their jobs by pursuing citizen-friendly policies.) In a 2004 paper comparing the pay of U.S. governors, LSE academic Timothy Besley concluded that there simply hasn’t been enough research on what goes into the making of a political class. It is, Besley writes, “weakly encouraging to the view that pay rates of politicians affect behavior,” but “the efficacy of monetary incentives in political settings is far from clear.”

Although undeniably prosperous—this is, after all, the setting for Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians—Singapore has also made compromises along the way that other countries might view as untenable. Its tax rates, for instance, are well below the average of other developed nations. There is still corporal and capital punishment; overzealous courts stifle political expression; and while elections are free, no significant opposition has emerged to the ruling People’s Action Party. The Democracy Index describes the country as a “flawed democracy.”

But dela Rama says Singapore doesn’t get enough credit, especially in the West, for its achievements. Income inequality is not as significant in Singapore as elsewhere in Asia, nor as pronounced as in most Western democracies. In dela Rama’s view, the facts that Lee Hsien Loong, the current prime minister, is the son of the country’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, and that Singapore is sometimes called a “family business,” are not necessarily bad things. “Instances of high-level nepotism have not had a deleterious effect on the country’s development,” she says.

On the occasion of his 2011 swearing-in, the younger Lee made the case for a well-paid political class. “Politics is not a job or a career promotion,” he said. “It is a calling to serve the larger good of Singapore. But ministers should also be paid properly in order that Singapore can have honest, competent leadership over the long term.” To American ears, such an assertion sounds politically brave, which is to say, insane. But Singapore’s record shows Lee might be right: Spending a little more in the first place can benefit a citizenry in the longer term. “There is truth to a statement you sometimes hear from senior members of the Singapore establishment,” Siddiqi says. “They say, ‘There’s a reason why we are some of the best paid ministers and bureaucrats, but we are not the wealthiest by far.’”

Amelia Lester is an Australian writer living in Japan.

Correction — An earlier version of this article used an incorrect phrase for a career in the Singaporean bureaucracy; it is sometimes referred to as an “iron rice bowl,” not an “iron rice ball.”