Speaking of credibility, the leaders have been talking about
plan to increase the population from 1990s but failed. The last
year of the dragon saw the highest birth then population growth
came back down.
Then came the double whammy to the population growth in the form of
migration of the educated due to erroneous elitist education
policy.
Thousands are migrating every year to Australia, USA, Canada, even
China ..Net population will continue to be insignificantly
small.
The post-war baby boomers who started businesses and set up
factories during the 1970s and 1980s are retiring at 55-60 in large
number from 2001 to 2006. These founding entrepreneurs were not
being helped due to high-cost, pro-foreign business policies and
government going into businesses to compete against them. Therefore
the economy is going to slow down further.
Past economic strategy was to (1) set up Jurong to industrialise
--1960s (2) graduate from labor-intensive to capital-intensive
--1970s (3) upgrade to value-add sectors -- 1980s.
The economy since 1980s were heavily dependent on foreign
investments without pursuit of any parallel plan to build own
capabilities. One hundred and one reasons will be given not to help
the locals and SMEs. Under such short-sighted economic planning,
any value-adding plans would only be nothing but ad hoc or
random.
Yet, without an overall economic master plan to leverage our
strengths and counter our weaknesses, the economy is basically
directionless. The local businesses are suffering and suffering
without much help from the government.
As I see it, Singapore past policies are causing the economy to
flounder badly during the last two recessions. Other Asian
economies are recovering faster than our economy. The standard of
living of the people are dropping back to the 1970s due to
unemployments, lower salaries and asset bubble bursts.
South Korea has gone through the same Asian Financial crisis and
recessions. It has come up on top with better manufacturing
growths. Its own MNCs are churning out large number of
world-beating products and keeping up the economic race.
The local businesses are dying and MNCs are progressively moving
out to less costly destinations.
Leaders are not consistent and focused in implementing a creative
economic master plan to provide directions to help all to compete
in world market. They are truly running out of ideas despite all
the claims of their own talents.
The above-stated reasons i.e. loss of economic planning strategy
etc, are precisely why we need to go for increasing the population
growth, more participation by youths in politics etc. If the
fundamental errors as posted are not corrected our leaders will
have to do all the unnecessary things like trying to get more
babies or set up a casino.
Where is the true leadership and talents among them to grow or
nurture more entrepreneurs or overcome our loss of economic
competitiveness due to high costs created by them or simply lack of
ideas.
Now that the economy is having a "back to the black" correction in
2004 after two prolonged recessions of 1996-1999 and 2001-2003, the
leaders will be quick to claim credit for the recovery when
actually such a recovery is the cyclical up-and-down of world
economy.
More ideas are needed to revive the present economy. The first task
is to come up with a vibrant economic master plan and produce a
strong team to carry out the plan if Singaporeans are to maintain
their asset values or earn a better living.
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