When I was going through my Facebook News Feed a few days ago, my friend posted an article on Bloomberg that shows how Singapore is able to keep up in the manufacturing industry despite the rise in costs, its constraints of labour and land. I chose to write about this article because there are a few things that I found surprising, one of them is how Singapore is able to shift productions of goods and services, “shift from making plastic flowers and mosquito coils to Boeing aircraft components and the development of bespoke medicine,” which is amazing how they are able to keep up with the current trends in the markets, which I believe that it is something difficult to do.

As a country, their goal is to employ higher-educated population and increase the peoples’ incomes. Apparently Singapore’s strategy as a country is to not only focus on its manufacturing industry, despite it is a core component of their gross domestic product. Even though workers in the manufacturing industry earn higher average monthly wages than those in other industries such as accommodation and food services industries, S$4,162 and S$1,800 respectively, there are more people working in research and development, with the Government investing S$16,1 billion towards research and development in 2011 to 2015. In general, this can create an assumption that businesses in Singapore are focusing on having technological advancements (which may lower their costs). Even though Singapore may not be the number one in manufacturing (making China its number one competitor), Singapore gains 19% of its GDP from manufacturing, less than that of Hong Kong and Australia.