Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the finance minister of Singapore, has been named as Euromoney's Finance Minister of the Year 2013.
Shanmugaratnam will receive this award during a private presentation at the World Bank/IMF annual meetings in Washington this week.
In conferring the award, Euromoney argues that Shanmugaratnam has played an over-arching role in enabling Singapore to shift its growth model from population-driven to productivity-driven expansion, while at the same time maintaining its status as an innovative trade and financial services hub to diversified export markets.
Commending Shanmugaratnam, Euromoney says: "Not content with resting on his laurels and relying on low taxes to attract foreign direct investment and business from Asia and elsewhere, finance minister Shanmugaratnam has spearheaded a push to find new sources of economic growth, while building a social safety net to address discontent over strained infrastructure and rising living costs.
"There is universal consensus that there is no better policymaker than Shanmugaratnam to push through this domestic agenda, while actively crafting policies to ensure the city-state maintains its relevance amid competition from such rivals as Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai and Dubai."
Euromoney, the world's leading publication for the global banking and finance industry, has been nominating a Finance Minister of the Year award for more than three decades. The previous three winners of the award are Russia's Alexei Kudrin in 2010, Australia's Wayne Swan in 2011 and the Philippines' Cesar Purisima last year.
Euromoney's decision is based on three factors: the opinions of a committee of Euromoney's senior editors, which is chaired by Euromoney's editor Clive Horwood; the views of the world's leading bankers, which we seek out in background meetings; and the analysis of the contributors to Euromoney Country Risk (ECR), which has more than 400 economists around the world contributing on a regular basis, as well as data sourced and compiled by ECR.
