And the Mauritians also speak their own version of Creole - Morisyen so straight off the bat they can speak up to three/four languages including those of Chinese descent who are fully integrated into a Mauritian identity rather than CIMO type classification.
It is a loss for the Tamil speaking community really - other minorities within that "Indian" catchment ended up taking Malay, for better or worse, at least they had exposure. Unfortunately they too succumbed to the temptation of "racial" preservation and pushed for their regional dialects to be introduced in school which will deprive these generations of access to the fundamentals of Malay/Bahasa.
Have a glance at Ravi Menon's
"An Economic History of Singapore: 1965-2065*" - albeit a fanciful imagining of what happens it does indicate the focus areas that are likely to be pursued - despite all hesitations about India, dismissing them outright means that those with their means will find avenues to park their spending power. Indonesia as the largest population also cannot be ignored.
(
* “It is always wise to look ahead but difficult to look further than you can see” - Winston Churchill. Everything about the future said here is pure imagination. It does not represent in any way a forecast or projection by MAS or by me. My intention is merely to paint a plausible scenario for Singapore. I can only be sure that someone reading this in 2065 will view it as totally lacking in imagination or realism or both.)
http://www.mas.gov.sg/News-and-Publ...es/2015/An-Economic-History-of-Singapore.aspx
2011-2025: Demographic slowdown and economic restructuring
The dominant theme in the third phase of Singapore’s economic history was the overcoming of resource constraints through a significant restructuring of the economy. While Singapore had always been short of land and labour, these constraints came to a head in the 2010s.
By 2011, annual growth in the total working age population had declined to less than 3%, and continued to fall steadily over the decade.
Foreign labour, which had driven Singapore’s labour force growth since the late 1970s, was already one-third of the total workforce.
It was neither economically efficient nor socially desirable to allow the foreign workforce to expand much faster than the local workforce.
By 2020, average total labour force growth was down to 1% per annum.
The central thrust of economic strategies in the 2010s and early 2020s was therefore to shift to a productivity-driven growth model. The aim was to increase productivity growth to at least 2% per annum, from the 1.4% averaged during the 2000s.
The growth of lower-skilled foreign labour was curbed through increases in the foreign worker levy and reductions in the foreign worker dependency ratio ceilings.
Financial incentives were given to firms to undertake capital deepening and adopt technology solutions to raise productivity.
Programmes were put in place to help Singaporeans develop and master skills in new growth clusters.
While the manufacturing sector had continually undergone restructuring and moved up the value chain in the preceding five decades, this was the first time the entire economy was undergoing such a transition.
It proved particularly challenging for many traditional domestically-oriented services like retail, hospitality, construction, real estate, and social services, which had come to be heavily dependent on cheap labour over the decades.
While many firms in these sectors successfully upgraded themselves and became more efficient, there was a substantial reduction in the size of these sectors by the early 2020s.
But the decisive turnaround in the quest for productivity came when services industries with a traditionally domestic orientation, like education and healthcare, re-positioned themselves by scaling up, investing in technology and talent, and exporting their services.
The idea of Singapore as a Global School House was not new but it was pursued with renewed vigour and came to full fruition only during this period. Singapore positioned itself as a choice location for quality education for a growing Asian middle class.
By 2025, international students studying in Singapore could be awarded joint degrees from 10 of the top 20 universities in the world.
Singapore was well on its way to become the premier educational hub of Asia.
Similarly, the healthcare sector was opened up.
By 2025, Singapore had become a multi-faceted medical hub hosting the world’s top medical professionals and multi-national healthcare companies.
This led to a vibrant ecosystem that created jobs in areas from research and training to conventions for medical professionals both locally and abroad, in addition to the large and diverse number of good jobs in hospitals.
This third phase of Singapore’s economic history marked the most significant step-down in Singapore’s economic growth, with real GDP growing by 3.6% per annum. However, it also marked the painful but successful economic transition towards productivity-led growth. By 2025, the economy had matured, with productivity growth accounting for virtually all of economic growth.
2026-2040: Regional integration and technological transformation
The fourth phase of Singapore’s economic development saw the fruition of the decades-long quest for regional integration and the rise to prominence of what we refer to today as our offshore economy. This was also the period that saw widespread technological transformation and the emergence of the ideas economy.
By 2040, the global centre of economic gravity had shifted decisively to Asia.
China was by far the largest economy in the world, with per capita incomes approaching that of upper middle income countries.
India emerged as the third largest economy in the world, with the largest middle class and a global network of indigenous multinationals.
But perhaps most significant for Singapore was the emergence of Indonesia as the fastest growing economy in the world, following far-reaching economic reforms in the early 2020s.
Singapore’s high-end manufacturing and modern services benefitted significantly from trade and investment links with these Asian giants, in addition to the Unites States and the North Euro Area.
But the real game-changer was the setting up of two supra-national economic zones.
In 2028, Malaysia and Singapore got together to set up the Iskandar-Singapore Economic Zone or ISEZ: one economic system spanning two sovereign countries.
The experiment succeeded beyond expectations, providing global and regional investors an integrated production and services base that was unmatched in Southeast Asia.
In 2030, the most ambitious blueprint of the ASEAN Economic Community process came into being, with the establishment of the ASEAN Free Economic Zone, or AFEZ.
Unlike traditional economic zones like the ISEZ which were contiguous entities, the AFEZ was a network of the major cities across ASEAN connected by extensive road, rail, air, and sea links, not to mention advanced digital communications.
There was free movement of goods, services, capital, and people between these cities, which become vibrant hubs for trade and enterprise.
While the bulk of the economic benefits of the AFEZ rightly accrued to the developing economies of Indo-China, Singapore benefitted from being the nerve centre of this network with extensive backward and forward linkages between the offshore economy and the territorial economy.
The Singapore economy which had hitherto been characterised by the export of goods and services was increasingly being driven by the export of capital and people.
Singapore firms shifted a substantial volume of production offshore and increased ownership of production facilities in the AFEZ.
Increased connectivity enabled large numbers of Singaporeans to work in the AFEZ while maintaining home in Singapore.
The government partnered the private sector to build offshore satellite towns and industrial parks in the AFEZ to cater to the needs of Singapore MNCs and overseas communities.
The gross inflows of income derived from the deployment of Singapore’s capital and people abroad rose by 50% between 2026 and 2040.
For the first time, these inflows exceeded the income repatriated abroad by MNCs operating in Singapore.
Gross National Income (GNI) per capita became the more relevant measure of Singapore’s income and standard of living than just GDP per capita.
The 2020s and 2030s saw the proliferation and convergence of several technological trends that transformed economies and societies globally.
Rapid progress in digital and mobile technologies, coupled with advanced biometrics and global wi-fi access, made payments virtually costless and highly secure, precipitating an explosion in the growth of digital commerce and digital finance.
Advances in cloud computing, big data analytics, smart sensors and learning machines transformed the provision of consumer and business services, including financial, legal, auditing, consultancy, and logistics.
They also spurred a transformation in the provision of social and public services such as telemedicine, online learning, and congestion control, substantially enhancing efficiency and consumer welfare.
Singapore was well-positioned for the pervasive digitisation of the global economy that occurred in the 2020s and 2030s, mainly due to two key initiatives that it embarked on in 2015 in the drive towards productivity-led growth:
The first was the concerted national effort to build and deepen skills at all levels through extensive worker retraining programmes and subsequent introduction of the teaching of digital technology across the education system.
The second was the drive to create a Smart Nation - building critical infrastructure and capabilities in digital and sensor technologies.
By 2040, a thriving ideas economy had taken root in Singapore, with value-added embedded in ideas rather than physical form.
The creation of economic value was associated increasingly with “dematerialised products” such as telecommunications, algorithms, software, design, testing and research.
At the same time, Singapore built on its traditional strengths in the ideas economy, namely marketing, branding, and global supply chain management.
Advances in robotics and 3-D printing helped to spawn new activities in Singapore’s offshore facilities in the AFEZ:
production of space vehicles and supersonic jet engines;
additive manufacturing of components for electric cars and autonomous vehicles.
Technological advances also transformed the structure of the territorial economy.
Cutting-edge biologics to produce drugs for cancer, auto-immune diseases, congenital disorders and dementia emerged as the largest component of manufacturing.
Real-time genome sequencing for disease control started from scratch to become one of the fastest growing segments within the territorial economy.
Infrastructure financing became the largest contributor to modern services, with Singapore-based financial institutions and markets financing projects ranging from the Sino-Indian lunar complex to the pan-ASEAN nuclear fusion reactors.
During this period, regional integration and technological advances helped sustain GNI growth of 2.9% per annum and GDP growth at 2.6% per annum, a remarkable performance given the maturing of the economy. But the period was not free of crisis.
The Global Cyber Crisis of 2034 triggered the deepest recession in Singapore’s history, with the economy contracting by 8.5% that year.
The resurgence of smallpox and resultant pandemic in 2039 plunged the global economy into a recession that lasted two years, not to mention the tragic toll on human lives. It remains till today the darkest period in our nation’s history.