Singapore Economic Strategy Review 2026
Happy New Year to all my readers! I have a few exciting news to announce through my blog but for now I want to focus on my thoughts, putting on my AI Professional Hat together with my Economist Hat, on the recently published Singapore Economic Review on 30 Jan 2026.
There were seven recommendations that are made to strengthens Singapore economy. Before I get into that, I just want to quote something from our Minister that is very sobering and, yes it is a signal that everyone in Singapore needs to play their part, cooperate and make an effort to improve their own future.
What is that statement?
“We can no longer assume that growth will automatically generate jobs,” ~Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Trade and Industry Gan Kim Yong
The recommendations are:
- Transform Singapore’s advanced manufacturing industry to establish global leadership in key sectors.
- Pursue emerging opportunities in quantum, decarbonisation and space technology to push the growth frontier of the economy.
- Establish Singapore as an AI leader where companies and top talent can develop solutions.
- Strengthen connectivity with global markets and aggressively support local firms to internationalise.
- Uplift and transform jobs to broaden Singapore’s range of good jobs.
- Evolve skills and training models to make lifelong learning a practical reality.
- Provide practical support for businesses to navigate transitions.
1. Transform Singapore’s advanced manufacturing industry to establish global leadership in key sectors.
A quick check at the EDB website, Singapore's advanced manufacturing are focused on high-tech machinery and equipment, together with pharmaceutical drugs. Based on the website, Singapore is the Top 5 global exporter of high tech goods, taking into account the following statistics:
Singapore produces 4 of the world’s top 10 drugs and is among the world’s top 10 exporters of machinery and equipment.
Strengthen Academic & Industry Tie Up
To establish Singapore as global leadership, we cannot run away from research. Now research can be done internally or outsourced to academics. However, research benefits tremendously when there are firstly more perspectives and the research team is able to bring together these perspectives into creating more innovative methods. I am suggesting a stronger tie up between manufacturers with our academic researchers.
Suggesting our to establish a matching platform that allows our local manufacturers to quickly find, assess, and select the suitable academics to work together on. The stronger tie ups can also increase the talent pool development, that support these manufacturing innovation by having the academic research team to impart the knowledge, to create jobs and momentum, to sustain this R&D cycle.
Encourage Manufacturing-Related Startup
Actively encouraging local and overseas manufacturing related to startup here will be good, to bring in more ideas and perspective to encourage innovation. However, hardware startups requires a different set of stakeholders in the ecosystem in order to kick start, for instance, licensing, cheap parts to produce prototypes etc. This is something the government can seek more feedback and provide the necessary to kickstart a hardware startup ecosystem.
2. Pursue emerging opportunities in quantum, decarbonisation and space technology to push the growth frontier of the economy.
There are much research done in these quoted areas, especially if you follow Netflix's Bill Gates series. Singapore has the right foundation to tackle these three areas, but we should take a measured approach towards it.
Suggestion is firstly, identify where Singapore can play a role in each of the technology with the unique resources that we have as compared to ours. Then we can bring in the necessary talents to push the growth frontier. Two advantages Singapore can offer, 1) a stable and safe environment for families and a good education system to complement. 2) availability of funding. Singapore can use these two advantages to attract world-class researchers over, but we first need to make some bets on which research areas we can focus on, and commercialise them as an end in mind, else the money spent does not help economy to grow.
3. Establish Singapore as an AI leader where companies and top talent can develop solutions.
The points I want to make will be similar to the above, talking about emerging technology. Artificial Intelligence is still very broad, so Singapore has to again determine which pillar of AI can Singapore play a lead in, where our available resource pool can support. Once we establish the AI niche we want to play in, we can then move on to the skills and knowledge we need to equip our local talent pool with so they can continue working on it.
Bringing World-Class Level Academic Conference to Singapore
Another point I want to make is, and I know the Singapore Government has been working on it and that is attracting the world-class academic conference to be held here in Singapore. This will bring outstanding talents from overseas to interact and further enhance the local talent pool, assuming the local talent pool gets into these conferences. To make this happen, Singapore Government may want to encourage hotels during these conferences to offer good packages, to lower the barrier of entry for more world-class academic researchers to come together.
4. Strengthen connectivity with global markets and aggressively support local firms to internationalise.
I know Enterprise Singapore has a department that is focused on helping local firms to internationalise, so a quick win is to re-look at the existing program and understand where the possible frictions are and look to reduce these frictions, for instance, improving the outreach program, selecting and bringing together groups of firms that can synergise, access to overseas contract and managing overseas dispute.
Framework for Overseas Expansion
Another initiatives that SG Govt can look at is establishing a framework that business who are keen to internationalise can refer to. The framework is to ensure businesses before they tackle oversea expansion, they have checklisted what improvements they need to make, for instance, technology maturity, digital transformation. With the framework shared, businesses can have a second perspective and gained confidence on whether they are ready to tackle the global markets, and the preparation work has been dealth with first. With the framework establish, government agencies can curate the expertise needed to assist local businesses to expand oveseas. To increase jobs created, government can curate and prioritise local expertise, and help the local experts to establish a strong consulting practice, creating opportunities firmly entrenched locally.
5. Uplift and transform jobs to broaden Singapore’s range of good jobs.
We can draw from point 1 to 4 above, when we start working on uplifting and transforming jobs in Singapore. Accelerate the research niche and direction, followed by moving businesses up the maturity level quickly, then more meaningful jobs can be created for the wider Singapore population. By helping businesses, especially local businesses, to strengthen we can keep the jobs locally.
Forward-Looking Talent Pool Creation
To ensure there is always a ready supply of talents to take up and support these meaningful jobs, we will need to first announce what are the jobs and the associated skills and knowledge that is needed. Work with our universities to start providing these courses, prioritising practitioners to conduct these courses where possible. By announcing it early and providing the courses needed, we can cut short the waiting time for businesses, so they do not have to wait too long for a position to be filled, in turn ensuring the position stays in Singapore rather than being filled somewhere else.
6. Evolve skills and training models to make lifelong learning a practical reality.
To be honest, I find this statement quite vague as in what is the actual challenge that SG government wants to tackle.
Lifelong learning is definitely here to stay. Majority of the Singaporeans, in this new era of technology taking up tasks faster than a human can take up, learning how to learn is going to be our way out, to consistently be able to move to the next job, to be consistently engaged with society.
Currently, as someone more than 45 years old, here is something I experienced already that makes lifelong learning a bigger challenge. Let me share a bit of my background for readers who are not familiar. I consistently learn. I set aside time to read and learn. However, as I age, I find that reading, understanding and absorbing the knowledge takes a longer time as compared to the younger days. Earlier years, I can take one full day to read, understand and digest an academic paper, but these days its much longer, like 1.5 full day perhaps. However, I figure a way to use Gemini and NoteBookLM to learn, things are getting brighter. The point I want to drive at is that it takes longer for any seniors to learn and pick up new skills and knowledge.
It is recommended, for the same content, have a different format and length of course for seniors instead. Perhaps this is what SG Government is referring to in (6)? When we design these training delivery models, it is best we keep in mind how to keep ageism at bay. It took us a long while to remove the stigma of streaming from our education system, so let us not re-introduce it back to adult learning.
7. Provide practical support for businesses to navigate transitions.
Again, frameworks can help here. A close working relationship between academic, business committees and government will help in establishing a credible framework for the rest of the business communities to adopt. As the framework is being adopted, data collection needs to happen and be brought back to update the framework further.
Framework can help those wants self-service, however, every businesses faces unique challenges given the business model, market, revenue, and resources. This is where boots on the ground is important. Again, it will be good to have a curated pool of consultants, preferably local again, to help business move up the learning curve and transition faster, for instance from digital transformation to data analytics and Artificial Intelligence.
Communicate the availability of resources through the business community and union. Take the opportunity to strengthen community and government engagement!
Conclusion
These are just quick thoughts and suggestion that Singapore Government can quickly establish to kickstart the strategy. As someone who is in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Data, together with my economics training, it makes for exciting times for me at least to see how Singapore evolves into an AI powerhouse, together with other technologies like quantum, security, space, etc. Very glad to have the front row seat and I wish Singapore economy all the best, and hopefully with my background and experience, I can further contribute to its growth, especially in Artificial Intelligence! :)
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