The Big Read: Confronting Singapore’s need for foreign manpower and talent, amid its ageing and shrinking workforce

SINGAPORE: One of many toughest balancing acts that successive Singapore’s leaders enjoy had to space up over the a long time is to bring in foreign talent to the nation while mitigating the inevitable tensions that near with it.

Manner abet within the 1980s, founding Top Minister Lee Kuan Yew had already spoken of the need to bring in skilled foreigners to spur Singaporean workers, and of the significance of expanding the talent pool given the nation’s little population.

Some 40 years later, when Singapore used to be on the cusp of leadership change final month, both the then-incumbent Top Minister and his successor would also broach the thorny teach.

Mr Lee Hsien Loong, in a media interview before handing over the reins to his deputy, Mr Lawrence Wong, described managing the “inherent tensions” between looking social cohesion and bringing in immigrants as the “most sophisticated” teach he has had to tackle throughout his 20-year tenure as Singapore’s third Top Minister.

Mr Wong, who assumed the premiership on Can also 15, told The Economist weekly in an interview on Can also 6 that while Singapore welcomes foreign professionals, this can also be carefully managed. “On story of whether it’s miles now no longer managed, I contemplate we are going to be with out anguish swamped,” he said within the interview.

In most in sort years, the manpower and talent teach in Singapore has taken on an added urgency as the nation grapples with the double whammy of falling delivery charges and a quick rising outdated population — which is ready so as to add up to a fall within the assortment of working-age adults.

Singapore’s total fertility rate, already dwindling since 2018, dipped to a ancient low of 0.97 for 2023. The fertility rate most primary for a generation to change its preceding one is 2.1.

On the different terminate of the lifestyles spectrum, Singapore is poised to change into a “gigantic broken-down” society by 2026 — where 21 per cent of its native population is above the age of 65. By 2030, this quantity will develop to at least one in four.