Moving Singapore Entrepreneurship To New Heights

Over the last three decades, Singapore had achieved a rate of economic progress equalled by few countries in the world. From a poor under-developed country with a per capita GNP of less than S$1000 in 1960, Singapore is today a newly industrialised economy with a per capita GNP of about S$24,000 and with full employment.Since the start of its industrialisation programme, Singapore has pursued actively a strategy to promote foreign investment, and this has been a major factor in its rapid economic growth, to the point that foreign investment policy is almost synonymous with its industrialisation strategy. However, changes in the business climate such as the economic slowdown in the industrialised world, growing global protectionism, spiralling business costs, changes in foreign investment patterns, just to identify some worrying trends, have led the government and the business community to work on developing a “second wing”.Singapore had leap-frogged the competition in earlier decades by riding piggyback on multinational corporations and this helped Singapore grow “one wing”— its domestic economy. Now the challenge is to nurture a new breed of entrepreneurs who can help Singapore to strengthen its domestic economy and also to seize opportunities to develop the second wing by way of an external economy that will see an increasing number of local companies venturing into the region.