LINDA LIM (University of Michigan) and PANG ENG FONG (Singapore Management University) welcome Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s call for a “major reset” in Singapore’s policies. They argue that the country’s “extensive growth model” is inefficient, inequitable and unsustainable.
In his National Day Rally speech on 18 August 2024, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, an economist and Minister of Finance, called for a “major reset” in Singapore’s policies that will require “a mindset shift in all of us”. “We are prepared to relook everything,” he had said on an earlier occasion, including “slaying sacred cows”.
On 30 August, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Trade and Industry Gan Kim Yong told economics students that economists can help the government make “tough choices” by “assessing the potential trade-offs”.
As Singaporean economists who have studied our economy for over half a century, we would like to contribute our professional expertise and experience. Today, we are thankfully not in crisis. But as both PM Wong and DPM Gan have said, the future will be very different. Many aspects of our successful past and current economic model will no longer work, or work as well.
What is Singapore’s economic model?
Singapore has followed what economists call an extensive growth model. Increases in output (GDP growth) are achieved primarily by quantitative increases in inputs of factors of production — capital, labor and land. This process is typically subject to diminishing returns over time, with more and more inputs required to produce a given quantity of output.
In contrast, intensive growth achieves growth through increased labor efficiency and improved capital utilization. This means there are gains in overall productivity, with fewer inputs required to produce a given output, or more output produced with given inputs. This typically requires technological innovation. Economics is essentially the science of how a society chooses to produce, distribute and consume the scarce resources of capital, labor and land available to it.
In Singapore’s case, high domestic savings together with large inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) provide increases in capital, while large inflows of foreign labor and talent provide increases in labor. The process is not entirely extensive: technological innovation can be generated through domestic R&D and imported with FDI, increasing productivity. But limited official data indicates that 70 to 90 percent of Singapore’s GDP growth since the 2008 global financial crisis has been due to increased inputs rather than increased productivity. The more detailed data in Figure 1 show that growth has been due entirely to capital and labor inputs. Total factor productivity[1] has become more negative as growth has slowed.
The data support independent private sector economists’ argument that weak productivity performance imperils Singapore’s competitiveness, growth and living standards.[2] We have underperformed other mature economies, including other relatively small, open, high-income economies, in both growth and productivity.
Figure 1 — Contributions to Real GDP growth: Singapore and peers compared
Recognizing this, government policy has focused on economic restructuring in a less labor-intensive, more highly-skilled direction, as should be expected in one of the world’s richest countries. But progress has been slow, with reliance on foreign capital and labor inflows increasing rather than decreasing. FDI inflows of US$159 billion in 2023 were more than double the amount in 2020, and a 13 percent increase over 2022, when global flows dropped by 2 percent. Foreign labor inflows were 8.2 percent greater in 2024 than in 2019. This has happened even as prospects for these inflows decline, and the contradictions and negative externalities they introduce into the economy (and society) intensify.[3]
Foreign capital inflows
FDI has been the bedrock of Singapore’s export manufacturing sector since independence, bringing capital, technology, management, export markets and intermediate input channels. This has been predicated on a liberalizing global economy, enabling Singapore to thrive as a trade, financial and industrial intermediary, especially between Western economies and China.
With diminished multilateralism and increased nationalism and geopolitical rivalry, nation states’ strategies to de-risk, “near-shore” and “friend-shore” investments, and pursue technological self-sufficiency, threaten to up-end this established pattern of global demand. Already in the West there is increased scrutiny of China-related supply chains and possible “Singapore-washing” in high-tech sectors, while the prospects for consumer and import demand in China’s domestic market are fading.
Domestically, Singapore’s success in attracting FDI has been enabled by a policy regime of free trade and capital flows with liberal importation of labor and skills, and excellent infrastructure, services, security, ease of doing business and quality of life. All of these generate what has been called the “Singapore premium” — a willingness of multinationals to pay higher costs here than they would elsewhere — but only up to a point. FDI has typically required the added inducement of “investment incentives” — tax breaks or other corporate subsidies — to locate here. This practice is now limited by nationalist industrial policies in our major trade and investment partner countries — North America, Europe, and Northeast Asia, especially China. They are emulating our long-established state-directed investment strategy, on a much larger scale, to develop national technological self-sufficiency. They offer much larger subsidies themselves, while retaliating against others’ subsidies, taking aim at tax havens, of which Singapore is considered a leading example, and erecting protectionist barriers that threaten our exports.
FDI itself also contributes to inflation and high cost pressures in Singapore. New data centers and automated factories exert demand on scarce land (a fixed resource), labor, skills and utilities (electricity, water), pushing up prices for everyone. Unless affordable and stable alternative sources of energy can be found, they add to Singapore’s energy-intensity and emissions. The more technologically sophisticated the activity, the more likely it is that foreign skills will need to be imported with the capital, limiting job creation for Singaporeans. Before assuming that such job creation is a net benefit for Singaporeans, we need more information. For instance, how much does it actually cost in government bureaucracy, infrastructure expenditure and subsidies to create one foreign-invested private sector job for a Singaporean? What is her average wage less the opportunity cost of her alternate employment without the FDI? What are the number of foreign workers necessary to create that job? How long does that job last?
The recent policy shift toward attracting ultra high net worth (UHNW) individuals and families to set up family offices in Singapore, to manage part of their wealth, illustrates some of the trade-offs involved. Most of the wealth managed would be invested in globally diversified portfolios, not concentrated in Singapore. So far, it has not boosted our moribund stock exchange.[4] Jobs are created for high-earning finance professionals in the wealth management industry, and for workers in labor-intensive services, such as domestic helpers, personal services, retail and restaurant wait staff. In both categories (especially at the high end, for finance professionals), many are foreigners themselves. In the second quarter of 2024, 100 percent of the jobs created in the overall economy were for non-resident workers.
At the same time, both land and labor costs rise for Singaporeans and other local businesses. This has led to a spike in private property prices and rentals which cascades downward into the HDB resale market, contributing to asset and consumer price inflation and housing unaffordability.[5] Other negative externalities possibly associated with the family offices are congestion costs, environmental pressures, social inequality, and increased criminal activity such as money laundering and burglary. Some of these pressures are also generated by the entry of middle to upper-income (but not UHNW) expatriates, whose presence generates excess demand for scarce resources, particularly land. Family offices can also leave as quickly as they enter, adding the risk of volatility.
Already ranked as the world’s most expensive city,[6] inflation is making Singapore increasingly unaffordable and unattractive to FDI, including because of the high cost of living for their foreign staff. Companies will pay the “Singapore premium” only so long as it provides a return on capital in excess of competitor locations, which at least one calculation suggests has turned negative in recent years.[7] While Singapore benefits from footloose multinationals’ exodus from Hong Kong, other regional headquarters are already leaving for lower-cost neighboring cities like Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, as their policies and amenities improve, and Singapore’s costs increase. More seriously, the high costs of operating in Singapore particularly disadvantage homegrown Singapore companies. They must compete with MNCs for scarce land and talent, but in this era of globalized supply chains, do not get a compensating revenue boost from them. High costs come not only from the excess demand generated by FDI itself, but also from other government policies, particularly land pricing, and the raft of indirect taxes, usage fees and levies imposed on items and activities such as consumption, transportation, utilities and foreign labor. Unit labor costs in the economy rose by 9.1 percent in 2022, and 7.5 percent in 2023.
A more fundamental aspect of Singapore’s model that is potentially becoming unsustainable is the decades-long policy of running persistent large current account surpluses — the excess of export earnings over import spending. In 2022, this amounted to 19.3 percent of GDP. These surpluses are then invested overseas, as foreign portfolio capital outflows by the two sovereign wealth funds GIC and Temasek, constituting our much-vaunted “reserves”.
This recycling of excess export earnings prevents the Singapore dollar from appreciating as much as it otherwise would.[8] It has been considered “currency manipulation” conveying an “unfair competitive advantage” that may not be tolerated by future U.S. administrations. In an economy as open as Singapore’s, currency undervaluation affects a wide range of prices, distorting resource allocation. In particular, it penalizes domestic consumption, as import prices are higher than they would be if currency value were determined by market forces. Artificially high imported inflation thus contributes to the high cost of living. This is why the Monetary Authority of Singapore seeks to dampen inflation by strengthening the currency, though this also reduces the export competitiveness of activities with high domestic content, like tourism, education and other services.
Figure 2 — Current Account Balance of Selected Advanced Economies
Current account surpluses themselves arise from an excess of savings over investment in the private sector of households and firms, and government fiscal (budgetary) surpluses in the public sector. Over the decades that this policy has been in force, the net effect is that Singaporeans’ wages, consumption and domestic investment have been lower, even much lower, as a share of GDP than market forces would dictate. They are also lower than in other countries at the same or even lower level of per capita income. Not surprisingly, Singapore’s rank among the world’s richest countries falls the most of any country once prices (inflation) and hours of work (productivity) are taken into account.[9] Recently, concerns over the high and rising cost of living have spilled over into the public arena, suggesting that there may be domestic as well as external political constraints to this mercantilist model of growth.
Figure 3 — World’s richest countries, adjusted for costs and hours worked
Reproduced from The Economist
Foreign labor and skill inflows
If Singapore can no longer grow by attracting foreign capital with investment incentives and an undervalued currency (which cheapens assets and exports for foreign buyers), might it still grow by adding foreign labor and talent? Currently, Singapore is much more dependent on this than are other rich countries in Asia.
Heavy reliance on low-wage foreign labor is responsible for Singapore’s low productivity growth, as it removes the necessity and incentive for employers to invest in automation and skills. It is also responsible for low wages in many sectors of the economy which are excessively labor-intensive for such a high-income country, contributing to high inequality. The sub-par working and living conditions of migrant workers has also raised international human rights concerns, and are a stain on the country’s reputation. Government policy has long sought to reduce this dependence, but so far with little success.
Inflows of foreign skills at middle- and upper-income levels not only contribute to the high cost of living through excess demand — they are also discouraged by the same high costs, particularly housing unaffordability. Permanent immigration is additionally constrained by rigid CMIO (Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other) racial quotas. Foreigners already account for 40 percent of Singapore’s labor force, so negative externalities like concerns over social integration and national security will increase, particularly with the heavy reliance on a single sending country (China). As the pandemic showed, over-reliance on foreign labor can also exacerbate volatility.
Immigrants are unlikely to deliver the positive externality of a higher birth rate that could compensate for Singapore’s ultra-low total fertility rate. They are selected for higher education and skills, which are correlated with low fertility, and will adapt to the environmental pressures (high urban density, cost of living, housing unaffordability, competitive educational system etc.) that induce locally-born Singaporeans to have few children. Many immigrants already come from low-fertility China.
Role of the state
After separation from Malaysia in 1965, the newly sovereign Singapore government embarked on a strategy of labor-intensive export manufacturing. This had already stimulated the economies of Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong, following in the footsteps of Japan. What distinguished Singapore was a heavy reliance on foreign multinationals, rather than the domestic entrepreneurs who built up the industrial sectors of the other Asian economies. Beyond the free trade and capital flows of the British colonial era, this required government policies to attract FDI. These included generous tax breaks and public infrastructural investment, including on land that the state had compulsorily acquired from private owners. Another attraction was the guarantee of political stability and labor peace, through legislation passed in 1968 to restrict worker rights, including unions’ right to strike. Technocratic governance and an absence of corruption – achieved in part through high salaries in the civil service and public sector — ensured administrative efficiency in this “developmental state”.
Government-linked companies (GLCs) were created both to establish new industries and lead the transformation of old industries, including shipbuilding, shipping, banking and manufacturing. In 1974 Temasek Holdings was set up to hold and manage GLCs to ensure that they are commercially run. Most GLCs have been privatized and today companies with government as their major shareholder account for some 40 percent of Singapore’s stock market capitalization — more if REITS associated with GLCs are included. In the labor market, besides the levers regulating labor and talent flows, the government also invests heavily in manpower planning and skills training.
Most critically, the state owns nearly 90 percent of the scarcest resource — land. This includes the land leased to the Housing Development Board (HDB) estates housing over 80 percent of the population, and the land granted/sold to developers of commercial and residential property, two of the largest of which are themselves GLCs (CapitaLand and Mapletree). The largest use of employees’ (forced) savings, which the government controls through the Central Provident Fund (CPF), is to purchase HDB housing. The Singapore Land Authority prices state land at so-called “market prices”, which does not make sense given the state’s monopoly ownership of, and control of foreign demand for, land. Inflated land prices ripple throughout the economy as workers demand higher wages to meet their basic needs, landlords with a rental yield objective raise rents, and the whole cost structure inflates. The certainty of getting rich through asset price inflation in turn discourages innovation and entrepreneurship in favor of rentier activities.
Taking this statist model as a whole, it is clear that government direction, regulation or participation determines many features of Singapore’s economy. The model has generated growth, but is also responsible for wages and consumption that are lower, and prices and profits higher, than in other countries at a similar level of per capita income. In 2023, consumption was only 38.5 percent of Singapore’s GDP, compared with an average of 60 percent in OECD countries, and over 50 percent in China. Gross operating surplus, a proxy for profits, was 55.1 percent, and taxes less subsidies on production was 6.4 percent of GDP. The 42.9 percent labor income share of GDP is lower than in other advanced economies and China, as shown in Figure 4, and the lowest it has been since before independence.[10]
Figure 4 — Labour income: Singapore compared with selected economies
This economic model also leads to overinvestment in housing as a means of saving for retirement, which in turn requires ever-increasing housing values that can only be sustained by increased foreign demand. Land is a major input into all other prices in the economy, making the city an ever more costly location, contributing to high income and extreme wealth inequality, and ultra-low fertility. From 2008-23, wealth inequality in Singapore increased by 22.9 percent, the most of any country in UBS’ Global Wealth Report 2024. Meanwhile the government itself is the ultimate beneficiary of monopoly rents based on its ownership of land, the most limited resource.
But the state apparatus poses challenges going forward. These include monopolistic market distortions, the “crowding out” of the private sector (including in the talent market), and the entrenchment of vested interests in state entities and GLCs. Greater transparency and accountability of such entities is needed in order to assess if social goods like transport, communications, utilities and affordable housing are most efficiently and equitably provided by profit-oriented state or private actors, or by non-profit public entities. It is said that Singapore should accumulate large reserves to be managed by its sovereign wealth funds because they will provide better financial returns compared to the situation if the private sector of households and firms made savings and investment decisions. But such an assessment requires much greater data transparency than is currently provided by GIC and Temasek. And even if it were true that the current system maximizes financial returns, shifting societal values might instead dictate preference for a higher social return on citizens’ savings.
A new “social compact”
What an economy chooses to produce, consume and distribute depends on a society’s values and circumstances. PM Wong’s “Forward Singapore” consultative exercise in 2023 revealed a preference among Singaporeans for more “social inclusion”, and “diverse pathways for success”, which will presumably be part of the “new social compact” that he is promising to introduce. But the current economic model stands in the way of these aspirations.
For example, the Ministry of Manpower argues that because foreign firms employ 60 percent of Singapore residents in high-earning jobs, this “underscore(s) the importance of attracting foreign investments and the global talent that follows such investments, in a way that complements local resident workforce growth and creates good jobs for Singaporeans.” This indicates attachment to a model which privileges “the top 10 percent of the income distribution”, including foreigners (non-citizen residents, whose share of such employment is not provided), increasing social inequality rather than inclusion. The sectors where employment is growing — financial and insurance services, professional services, and information and communications — do not exactly provide “diverse pathways for success” for Singaporeans.
Meanwhile, aspects of the model raise costs and cause negative externalities borne by the rest of the population. Already a sizable proportion — perhaps 30 percent — of Singapore citizens/residents cannot make ends meet in one of the world’s richest countries. Their wages are too low — depressed by competition from lower-wage foreign labor — and the cost of living too high — exacerbated by an undervalued currency, foreign capital inflow and high-priced land (owned by the government). Their basic needs cannot be met without subsidies for everything from housing to education and health care, and GST rebates – which are themselves not necessarily adequate.
The services required by a rapidly-ageing population are anticipated to keep increasing, and nearly 40 percent are challenged by retirement inadequacy. In response, the government’s policy choice has been to raise GST (a sales or consumption tax), which is regressive, depresses growth, and adds to the high cost business environment. It is unwilling to raise direct taxation because low income and negligible wealth taxes are considered a necessary inducement for foreign capital and talent, and it is ideologically opposed to “redistribution” — even though there has long been de facto redistribution from the poor to the rich, with generous corporate subsidies given to foreign shareholders. The government is also unwilling to increase spending out of huge (and constantly growing) foreign reserves; and it is reluctant to reallocate fiscal resources in the budget toward more social spending.
From an economist’s perspective, the underlying model is both inefficient and inequitable. It is also unsustainable, domestically and internationally. Growth has been achieved through an extensive model of adding capital and labor to fixed land, generating domestic inflationary pressures and inhibiting productivity growth while increasing inequality and volatility in crisis. The mercantilist playbook extracts a high opportunity cost through excess reserves, and risks attracting increased ire from trade partners at a time of serious geopolitical tensions.
“Trade-offs” and “tough choices”
In rethinking Singapore’s economic model, then, and to return to the language of PM Wong and DPM Gan, what are some of the “trade-offs” involved in the “tough choices” that must be made for a “major reset”?
First, economics here is the science of allocating scarce resources among competing needs to maximize citizen welfare. The standard goals are efficiency (getting the most output/income possible from fixed resources) and equity (having output/income well-distributed among different groups of citizens). By both criteria, Singapore’s extensive growth model is suboptimal. It is inefficient, because it requires more resources to produce more output, and discourages productivity improvements. It is inequitable, because it depresses labor income and consumption, while increasing returns to capital (profits) and land, including through “monopoly rents” that go disproportionately to the state, GLCs and MNCs.
Second, economists consider “opportunity costs” in our assessment of the benefits and costs of policies or practices. What would scarce resources produce in alternative uses? For example, the policy of running large budget and current account surpluses to build up foreign reserves has the opportunity cost of reducing private sector consumption, investment and GDP growth. The state, GLCs and MNCs essentially crowd out domestic enterprise in both input and output markets.
Third, economists’ benefit-cost analyses include externalities — unintended positive or negative consequences or spillovers of particular policy actions or investments, that are not adequately captured by market forces. Environmental costs are most commonly cited here — housing and other facilities constructed to accommodate and employ an ever-increasing population contribute to higher temperatures, energy-intensity and emissions. The large and growing foreign immigrant and transient population raises concerns about social integration, national identity and national security, while the resultant rising cost of living and urban density exacerbate low fertility and all the problems that come with it.
Fourth, the institutional conflation of retirement forced savings (CPF) with housing (HDB) diverts scarce capital, labor and skills into rent-seeking intermediation (housing appreciation, construction, property agent commissions) rather than new value-creating activities. This focus on exchange rather than entrepreneurship to deliver growth in incomes and wealth includes a preference for investing in property rather than the stock market for financial returns.
On top of these internal contradictions, PM Wong and others have already highlighted that Singapore’s economic model may no longer be viable or sustainable in the changed geopolitical and international economic policy environment. But turning away from this model will involve, as they rightly note, “trade-offs” and “tough choices”.
For example, reducing dependence on low-wage foreign labor will encourage capital deepening (capital per worker), innovation and productivity increase (output per worker). But in the short to medium term costs will rise, and some of the many businesses which have got used to labor-intensive methods, mostly local SMEs, will fail.
Cutting back on reserve accumulation through faster currency appreciation will reduce imported inflation but hurt export competitiveness.
Switching from indirect taxes (like GST) to direct taxes (like income and property taxes) will lower costs and improve distribution, but may undermine the country’s attractiveness to high-earning professionals, MNCs and UHNW individuals setting up family offices.
Lowering the price of land, including for HDB units, will lower costs, stimulate the growth of non-housing sectors, thus diversifying (and stabilizing) the economy. Lower land prices will also facilitate earlier family formation, thus increasing fertility, and improve retirement adequacy. But it will also reduce Singaporeans’ property wealth, on which their retirement savings have been invested.
Restructuring the state sector to limit government ownership to the non-profit provision of public goods – “natural monopolies” like utilities, water, mass rapid transit — will release capital, labor and especially management and skills to the private sector which GLCs have crowded out. But this will be resisted by powerful vested interests which benefit from their role in the existing system, like the high-earning management and boards of GLCs, senior executives of MNC subsidiaries, and top government officials whose salaries are calibrated to the 90th percentile of those in the private sector.
Reducing the investment incentives and indirect as well as direct subsidies provided to corporate investors will erode this source of budgetary pressure and ensure a more market-conforming, hence more efficient and likely more equitable, allocation of scarce resources. In any case this may be inevitable, as global pressures make it impossible to continue with corporate incentives and subsidies. But there will be a painful period of readjustment, during which FDI falls more than any increase in domestic investment compensates for its decline.
One new policy on the horizon that, if properly designed, would alleviate Singapore’s extreme land, labor and carbon constraints and expand its economic space is the proposed Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone, reminiscent of the “Growth Triangle” concept of the 1990s. Proximity to Singapore is already transforming southern Johor with energy-intensive data centers for AI. But care must be taken that this does not simply perpetuate the extensive growth model, in the same way as easy access to foreign labor has done.
These trade-offs do not mean that tough choices that will yield better economic and social outcomes cannot be made – a task in which, as DPM Gan correctly noted, economists can help. But they do require public understanding and political will
Conclusion
Making the tough choices between trade-offs in economic policy should be based on a society’s values. We believe the time is right for an inclusive national discussion about what values are critical to build a good society — with sustainable opportunities for personal fulfilment and shared ideals about equitable economic progress and social stability. Any “new social compact” must be enabled by the fundamental economic model.
From economists’ perspective, the choices of Singapore’s policy-makers to date have prioritized maximum short-run growth of the economy over efficiency and equity in production and distribution – there has been a pattern of crowding ever more activities on to a fixed small land space and importing the capital, labor and skills to operate them. In the process, fiscal austerity, excess reserve accumulation, the privileging of foreign investment, and state dominance have become “sacred cows”. At the same time, domestic private enterprise has shriveled,[11] inequality has increased, and living standards and the quality of life have deteriorated for many citizens as costs soar.
The time has come to make different choices among the trade-offs that confront us, to maintain the integrity, prosperity, security and identity of our nation.[12] While long-term restructuring toward a fairer and more sustainable economic model will involve major costs and risks, these may be mitigated by the massive reserves built by decades of excess savings. A “major reset” will make this possible.
Notes
The authors thank Manu Bhaskaran (Centennial Asia Advisors), Ian Chong (National University of Singapore), Tan Kim Song (Singapore Management University) and Teo You Yenn (Nanyang Technological University) for their helpful comments on their draft.
[1] Total factor productivity (TFP) is the part of real GDP growth which is not explained by capital or labor inputs, taken to represent efficiency in the use of inputs. Negative TFP indicates that less output is being produced relative to the increase in inputs, or inefficient utilization of inputs is a drag on growth.
[2] See also Pang Eng Fong and Linda Y.C. Lim, “Labour, Productivity and Singapore’s Development Model” in Linda Y.C. Lim (ed.), Special Issue on A 50-Year Retrospective on Singapore’s Economic Development, Singapore Economic Review, Vol. 60 No. 3 (2015). More recently, the Economic Survey of Singapore 2023 shows that value added per hour worked in 2023 was -2.4 percent, down from -0.7 percent in 2022.
[3] For earlier and more detailed critical discussions of the Singapore model, see Linda Lim, “Singapore’s Economic Growth Model – Too Much or Too Little?” in Ethos, Issue 6 (July 2009), pp. 36-42, Civil Service College, Singapore; Linda Y.C. Lim, “Singapore’s Success: After the Miracle” in Robert Looney (ed.), Handbook of Emerging Economies, pp. 203-226, Routledge (2014); Linda Y.C. Lim, “Singapore: Economy” in Far East and Australasia 2017, pp. 983-992, Routledge (2016,) 48th edition.
[4] The Singapore stock market has significantly underperformed both other developed economies, and emerging market economies, over the last 30 years. Calculations are available at msci.com.
[5] Note however that housing unaffordability improved in 2023 due to the expansion of government grants and subsidies for first-time home buyers.
[6] The costs borne by MNC expatriates are similar to those of the upper echelon of their local employees, and other professionals, and have a ripple effect on domestic consumers given the increased pressures on scarce land, housing, labor and services. https://socialservice.sg/2024/05/06/ge-economy-linda-lim/
[7] Calculation by Centennial Asia Advisors
[8] When foreign demand for our exports exceeds our domestic demand for imports, relative demand for our currency is strong. This should push up its price, or exchange rate – the amount of foreign currency required to “buy” a Singapore dollar – causing exports to fall as they become more expensive, and imports to rise as they become cheaper. But if the excess foreign currency earned from exports is instead used to “buy” foreign assets like gold, stocks, bonds and properties denominated in foreign currency, to be added to reserves, this increases demand for foreign currency/reduces demand for the Singapore dollar, which is then prevented from appreciating.
[9] Singaporeans’ hours of work are among the longest in the world, as are rates of stress and burnout. https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/lifestyle/stressed-and-overworked-are-singapore-employees-condemned-burnout
[10] Conference Board, Total Economy Database, 2024.
[11] The decline of the medieval city-state of Venice has been attributed to the loss of entrepreneurial spirit in the upper classes as they turned to “large incomes from land deals and public offices”, Pang Eng Fong and Linda Lim, “Political Economy of A City-State”, Singapore Business Yearbook 1981/82, pp. 7-33 passim.
[12] Linda Lim, “Singapore: Place or Nation?” The Straits Times 19 June, 2006.