Mr Speaker,
Post independence, we were razor-focused on pursuing economic growth as a young nation trying to stand on our own two feet, opening ourselves to foreign investment, connecting ourselves with networks of global trade, and providing fertile ground for businesses – both global and local – to flourish. This resulted in vast improvement of the quality of life for large swathes of our population, and for many, the promise of a better future for our next generation was a beacon of hope for which we worked towards.
Yet, in recent years, it is not unheard of for our residents to ask: should economic growth be our ultimate endgame?
The latest Economic Strategy Review (ESR) report provides us a valuable opportunity for reflection, and to rethink what progress means to Singapore. But in a time where retrenchments dominate newspaper headlines, anxious residents worry about unstable livelihoods, and our little red dot feels the ever-rising heat from climate change, it is timely for us to think how we can put economic growth in service of broader societal progress. We need a Singapore economy that provides breathing room for each and every one of our people to be the best version of ourselves.
A few years back, I spoke about Kate Raworth’s concept of Doughnut Economics, which envisions an economy that places at its heart a collective well-being and equality to achieve a “safe and just space for humanity”, whilst protecting our Earth from further environmental destruction. This is more relevant than ever. Our economic policies must embody an ethos of equity and collective and planetary well-being, while providing opportunities for all in our society to thrive.
I will address three key areas today towards this goal:
First, tackling our care system.
Second, providing the right ecosystem for creatives and entrepreneurs to thrive.
Third, protecting our planet.
Representing our diverse strengths
If our economy is to be rooted in equity and collective well-being, we must first look at who determines how our economic pie is sliced.
Of the members and five committees involved in the ESR, it appears to mainly comprise C-suite and NTUC union leaders. Even as we recognise their insights, organisations representing migrant workers, women’s rights, and persons with disabilities should also have been more clearly represented.
Our economic trajectory must be shaped by the people, with the people, for the people. Diversity in perspective, representing the diverse stakeholders in our economy, must be used to identify potential blind spots and marginalised communities, and how these diverse communities live and experience our policies – economic and otherwise.
Care for the care economy
When we talk about economic contribution, our economic structure often focuses on the elite worlds of finance, tech, and commerce. Yet, our economy is kept dynamic by a very diverse group of professionals whose contributions are invaluable for our collective economic success.
In particular, our care economy, comprising both paid and unpaid labour in childcare, eldercare, healthcare, and various social services. A foundational building block for any economy, our care infrastructure is what leads to the broader growth, well-being and human development for current and future generations. Building our care infrastructure must be seen as a priority, not just as an afterthought, a problem to fix due to demographic changes.
In this line, Thrust 5 of the ESR recommended that we improve the attractiveness of AI-resilient sectors such as allied health, early childhood education, and social work. Many proposals were raised, such as job redesign, clarifying progression pathways, and strengthening skills development and certification. It also included increased wage support.
Granted it is a tricky balance. An example can be seen in action by the UK’s latest attempt to reform social care, which is envisaged to be a long and costly process involving difficult decisions, even as there is room for statements that carers need to be the best paid in society, rather than the worst. Yet even in Singapore, wage support is sorely needed for our caregivers. Latest MOM data as of June 2025 indicates the median gross wage earned by registered nurses at $5,129 per month. Social workers earn $4,565. Preschool teachers earn $4,150. These numbers are lower than the overall median gross monthly income from employment of $5,775.
Even as we acknowledge that wage support is overdue, care workers must be better acknowledged and supported for their invaluable contribution towards our society, regardless of their ability to weather AI-induced disruptions. Wages in the care economy must commensurate with the rising cost of living.
We also need to address the heavy emotional toll faced by our care workers. A 2022 study published in the Singapore Academy of Medicine Official Journal measuring burnout in the public healthcare sector between July 2019 to January 2020 found that 37.8% of respondents have high emotional exhaustion scores, 29.7% have high depersonalisation scores, and 55.3% had low personal accomplishment scores. Another study conducted in the second half of 2024 in our National University Polyclinics also found that nearly 10% of participants stated that they intended to leave their current position in the next six months. The authors found this concerning, noting that the resignation rate of healthcare workers during the Covid pandemic was just 4%.
Just as the Law Society recently started to review the prevailing work culture for lawyers, it is time for our regulatory bodies to work with industry and NGOs in care economy segments to officially track workplace well-being and examine prevailing workplace standards.
Support for local entrepreneurship in the care economy is also key. The care economy is highly labour intensive, and our general grants supporting capital needs in entrepreneurship and capability building need closer scrutiny. While the current existence of the VentureforGood grant administered by raiSE supports early- and growth-stage social enterprises for up to $300,000 in capital expenditure and operating costs, how can we support more startups and commercial enterprises in the space to bring sustainable investments into the care economy? raiSE SG must work with MTI and MSF jointly to review the care economy investment ecosystem, to build a more sustainable investments and employment ecosystem.
Caregiving is also borne by informal caregivers such as family and friends. This labour of love is not reflected in GDP figures, but its importance is underscored by the inaugural Duke-NUS study which valued the economic contribution of informal caregiving for seniors at $1.28 billion annually. The efforts of our caregivers often come at a cost, sacrificing their health, careers and leisure time to care for their loved ones. It is also why I have been calling since 2020 for official, regular time-use studies for us to better understand our carers’ needs, and to measure the hidden economic and personal costs behind care. Carers also need better support, which is why our party’s manifesto has called for, amongst others, compensation for family caregivers and the expansion of respite care.
Singapore must bridge the gap of seeing care beyond being a cost. We must see caregiving as a growth segment that builds not just the economy of today but the society of tomorrow.
Passion Made Possible
Our society of tomorrow must also support creatives and entrepreneurs who dare to dream and pursue their own passions. How do we ensure that our local entrepreneurs and dreamers can have their passion made possible in Singapore?
To create the conditions for entrepreneurship to grow, we must first as a society foster a culture of self-discovery and exploration from young. Expanding entrepreneurship-related programmes in schools and encouraging critical thinking and empathy – as prescribed in the ESR report – only goes so far if our system does not reward risk-taking or having room to make mistakes and learn.
How do we explain the gap between the decades-long efforts to build an education system to be “more holistic”, against the reality that these additional layers simply create new pathways for education arms races? What do we need to do to address parents’ or would-be parents’ fears for the next generation in an age of million dollar HDB resale prices, ever-soaring COE prices and the never-ending sense of scarcity?
While this is a whole other topic, it is relevant to our economic policies for the future. For today, I would like to instead focus on our creatives and entrepreneurs.
Our creatives are risk-takers and visionaries. They turn ideas into commercial and cultural value, and inspire the wonder that a thriving society needs. Yet a career in the arts remains a difficult choice in Singapore. Regulatory hurdles have forced artists to alter or remove public artworks, while beloved arts spaces have shuttered under rising costs and redevelopment pressures. These are not small setbacks, they chill the very activity we say we want to nurture.
The one-off Culture Pass is only a first step. What our creatives need is sustained support: dedicated work, display, and commercial spaces to hone their craft and earn a decent living, backed by sensible commercial space regulations. These should sit alongside spaces for budding entrepreneurs, much like the creative and cultural parks we see in cities such as Beijing and Taipei, proof that culture and commerce can thrive side by side.
Supporting ambitions large and small
Next, supporting the growth ambitions of our businesses large and small. Small home-based businesses can be a testbed for aspiring founders to launch businesses. But the next step is often daunting, with commercial overheads quickly becoming prohibitive. Can the government across agencies provide more affordable short-term stalls and shop spaces across HDB-, URA-, and JTC-managed properties for first-time entrepreneurs, taking inspiration from the now ubiquitous shared office facilities to offer smaller modular units with lower renovation and deposit requirements, and allow tenancy periods that are shorter, or easier contractual conditions for potential exit?
For SMEs looking to scale, the ESR report acknowledges that “companies still find it difficult to secure growth-stage capital,” and that Temasek already participates in SME coinvestment. But what our businesses need to grow is bolder and broader-based access to financing, catalysed by private and public capital. ESG co-invested companies through the Startup SG Equity scheme should be required to list on either the SGX mainboard or CATALIST, and ESG should work with SGX on governance and disclosure requirements for co-invested companies to ease the path to listing. Together with the Equity Market Development Programme, this can improve liquidity in our domestic equity market and attract more liquidity into these companies.
Such companies should also be explicitly tracked on the impact they have beyond returns, for example their contribution to activity and employment in Singapore. This is similar in spirit to Ireland’s Strategic Investment Fund, which has a “double bottom line” mandate.
Adding safety nets to trampolines
To further encourage would-be entrepreneurs, we also need an ecosystem with structural measures to promote necessary risk-taking for success. After I spoke in early May this year about supporting entrepreneurship amongst youth, including a call to adapt our current bankruptcy framework, a Straits Times article on 26 May indicated that business failure is among the top reasons why individuals go into personal bankruptcy. Yet working out of bankruptcy is often difficult with practical limits on day-to-day activities and no automatic discharge. This can hold back those with bold ideas from taking the plunge.
Pro-debtor reforms have been found to be linked to better entrepreneurship and innovation outcomes. An EU expert group report in 2011 suggests that, QUOTE, ‘a second chance policy that enables formerly bankrupt entrepreneurs restart may represent one of the most promising and under exploited policy options for company creation and job growth’. The EU has since adopted a more balanced, preventive restructuring approach for bona fide entrepreneurs seeking a second chance. I would thus repeat our call to see if our bankruptcy regime can be reformed to encourage more would-be entrepreneurs to step up.
Protecting Mother Earth
Finally, thriving humans need a flourishing planet. Yet, the relentless pursuit of economic growth has resulted in the overextraction of precious natural resources, damage to ecosystems, and disruption to communities.
Thrust 8 of the ESR recommended that businesses prepare for a low-carbon and climate-resilient future. Noticeably, a heavy emphasis was placed on preparing businesses to shield themselves from the harmful effects of climate change, while not acknowledging that historically it has been corporations and industrial development that have been the very reason for planetary distress.
We need more attention and details on how our policies will make our enterprises and economy to be part of the solution to climate change, particularly in view of how Thrust 2 of the ESR involves making Singapore a global leader for AI.
As I said during the debate on Singapore’s use of AI, there is undoubtedly potential to harness the power of AI for greater economic and societal good. Yet, we at the same time also hear about how low-wage workers in developing nations are forced to view explicit content to train AI, as well concerns about adverse effect on cognitive development and critical thinking. Most expressly, data centres – driven by AI-induced demand – guzzle up large amounts of energy and water, increasing carbon emissions, driving up utility prices, and disrupting the lives of nearby communities.
The earlier 2019 moratorium on new data centres, as well as higher operating costs here, drove operators to set up shop in neighbouring Johor and Batam, with Singaporean companies owning the largest proportion of data centre capacity in both regions. This has caused disamenities for local communities, even prompting a group of Johor residents to protest against the construction of a nearby data centre. Moving data centres further away also does not solve the problem. During my trip to Thailand in June, I noticed that while policymakers was excitement about investment and growth opportunities for AI in partnership with countries like Singapore, there were also concerns about the environmental and sustainability impact of such investments. And
While the planned resumption of data centre construction in Singapore requires the use of greener energy sources, how exactly are we balancing the needs for our precious land? Does this result in land that could otherwise be maintained to be for nature and green spaces to be ultimately razed down to meet industrial and housing requirements?
Such green spaces, key to bolstering our heat resilience, are rapidly disappearing in the name of growth and economic survival. Concern is mounting over forests to be cut down for housing at Maju Forest and Gillman Barracks, alongside a patch of forest near Woodlands Checkpoint would be cleared for the development of a new commercial hub, while over 52 hectares of forested land would be cut down for the next phase of the Jurong Innovation District.
Intensifying business and industrial operations ultimately affects our energy consumption. The EMA noted that electricity consumption increased by 4.0% year-on-year in 2024, with commerce and services-related businesses consuming the highest proportion that year at 40.2% of our total electricity use.
The situation is worse for water, particularly with data centres being huge consumers. Already, non-domestic water consumption takes up 55% of our total water use, and PUB estimates this is expected to increase to 60% by 2065. What are we doing to mitigate this impact?
And even before we craft our policies to address the impact on the climate, we must first measure their environmental impact. As I first mentioned during my Budget speech in 2022, a critical first step would be to track and monitor our policies’ environmental outcomes via an environmental dashboard. This could be aided by the recent introduction of the Singapore Classification for Environmental Purposes, which is used to classify data relating to environmental activities and products.
We would do well to remember that Mother Earth is not humankind’s personal ATM. We must ensure that our economic policies should not result in further destruction of our planet, and a transparent accounting of its environmental outcomes would be a helpful tool to keep us on our toes.
For our future generations
Mr Speaker, progress towards tomorrow does not mean that we compromise on our collective well-being for the sake of GDP growth. Progress means that we, as a society, support balanced and well-rounded lifestyles, weave strong safety nets for our people, recognise all who contribute meaningfully to society, provide opportunities for everyone to dream big, and uphold our responsibility as stewards of Mother Earth.
The society of tomorrow that is built in Singapore must be one where ALL of us will thrive and enjoy the fruits of our effort together, and I believe we can achieve that, and so much more, for us and the generations that come.
Thank you.
