Singapore’s Productivity Challenge: Part II

Abstract

Since 2010, the Singapore government has committed to reduce the rate of growth in foreign labour, and to support economic growth through increases in labour productivity. Singapore’s economic policy challenges today bear little resemblance to the pressing, existential challenges the country faced more than 50 years ago in 1961, where the priority was employment creation. This case explores how Singapore’s challenges in raising labour productivity today could be, to a large extent, the product of economic policy decisions made in the past. Part 2 covers the years 1985 to 1998.