Singapore may struggle to achieve 3% annual growth productivity

That is if Singapore wants to increase real incomes for Singaporeans broadly, including those with low incomes.

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Manpower Tharman Shanmugaratnam, in the addendum to the President’s Address, said, “The National Productivity and Continuing Education Council will coordinate and provide strong support for this national productivity effort. The $2 billion National Productivity Fund is helping industries implement specific roadmaps to improve productivity through market and business development, automation, better use of IT, job and process re-design and training.”

Here’s the summary of the addendum:

MOM’s Objectives & Priorities:

• Achieve Inclusive Growth. Help Singaporeans secure good jobs and raise skills, so as enjoy sustained increases in wages over the next 10 years. Special focus on lower-income workers

• A balanced approach to manpower policies. Help companies adjust to a tight labour market so as to keep overall share of foreigners at no higher than one-third of workforce in the long term

• Singaporeans to have ample opportunities to develop abilities and be at the core of a diverse, globally competitive workforce even as we remain open to talent from abroad

Three Key Thrusts

Push for Productivity and High Skills for Every Job in the Singapore workforce:

• Seek to achieve 2-3% annual growth productivity over the next 10 years, as basis for increased incomes for all including lower-income Singaporeans

• Help businesses to take advantage of tax incentives and the $2 billion National Productivity Fund

Promote passion for lifelong learning – Government will extend CET coverage to include all segments of workforce, improve CET quality

Foster Inclusive Growth

• MOM will take further measures to help low wage workers upgrade, secure good jobs and achieve higher incomes:
o Review of Workfare schemes and encourage companies to adopt responsible outsourcing practices

• Older workers a key focus as Singaporeans are now healthier and living longer. Retirement and Re-employment Act will be in force from January 2012
o Review the CPF contribution rates of older employees
o Improve the product features in CPF Life to ensure retirement needs are met.

Promote Harmonious, Fair and Safe Workplaces

• Renew and strengthen tripartism to address manpower challenges, including developing guidelines that promote fair merit-based opportunities for Singaporeans

• Strengthen MOM’s system of enforcement and penalties to deter abuse of rules governing employment of foreign workers, and to ensure their well-being

• Refine our Foreign Domestic Worker (FDW) policies to improve entry/recruitment of FDWs and experience of employers/FDWs

• Press on with our efforts to raise workplace safety standards and reduce our workplace fatality rate to less than 1.8 per 100,000 workers by 2018

You're the reader we write for. You're also the person our partners want to reach.

If that sentence describes you — a founder, a C-suite, someone whose attention companies pay good money for — then you already understand why SBR works. We've spent twenty years earning the trust of readers exactly like you. Which is exactly what makes this an interesting place for your company to show up, too.

The ways it can show up are broader than most people assume — thought leadership articles, sponsored content, industry summits across Southeast Asia, regional awards programmes, podcasts, and media placements in print and digital. The right fit depends on what you're trying to do, which is why we'd rather start with a conversation than send a rate card.

If your company has something this audience should know about, we'd like to hear what you're working on.

No rate cards until we understand the brief. It's a better use of everyone's time.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia

Top News

30 One-Sentence Stories From People Who Have Built Better Habits

None of these stories are mine. They were sent to me by readers of Atomic Habits. My hope is that these examples will illustrate how real people are putting the book into practice. They will show you what people are actually doing to build good habits and break bad ones. And hopefully, they will spark some ideas for how you can do the same.

news conversion

SBR 5 Lorem Ipsum News 2 [8 May]

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

SBR 4 Lorem Ipsum [8 May Top Stories]