In 2008 due to global financial crisis, Singapore’s economy shrank from economic growth of 7.8% in 2007 to 1.1% GDP growth in 2008; this is due to the fall of exports and curbed tourism. At present, Singapore emerges from its worst recession on record after economy expanded at an annualized rate of 20.4% in the second quarter of 2009.

Labor

The workforce of Singapore is viewed as the nation’s greatest natural resources. However due to high rate of economic growth and increasing number of Singaporeans over the retirement age resulted in a highly significant labor shortage. The National Trades Union Congress (NTUC), the sole trade union federation of the country and the government are working together to increase lagging productivity and to boost the labor force participation rates of women and old workers. There are 67.3% of labor force in service sector and 19.8 in manufacturing industry and approximately 24% of the labor force is foreign workers. Due to the present global financial crisis the unemployment rate in Singapore push to a three year high of 3.3% in 2008.

Industry

One of the mainline of Singapore’s economic growth is the manufacturing sector. With 24.6% of real GDP comes from manufacturing. The country’s rapid industrial advances that undergone in the mid 1970s was based on low-cost labor, low to middle level technology and spurts in exports. Despite the crisis in 1998, and 2001 the performance of the manufacturing sector showed a rising trend in the past 18 years. The growth in manufacturing clusters - electronics, chemical, biochemical, machinery and transport engineering can be attributed to different factors such increased of production of semi conductors and other related products, increased output in petroleum and petrochemical segments, expansion in pharmaceutical segments, growth of precision engineering cluster and increased output in marine and offshore engineering and aerospace segments. Other factors that contributed are value added services and productivity.

Tourism

One of the major industries in the country is the Tourism sector. Singapore Tourism Board is an economic development agency in charge of the tourism sector. The main function of the agency is to develop tourism and built the sector into a major economic source of the country. In 2005 there were 8.9 million tourist visitors in the country with an average stay of 4.2 days. In 2007, the country achieved 10.3 million visitor arrivals, while in 2008 despite the decline of visitors to 10.1 million; the country got a record high of tourism receipts of S$15.2 billion at a growth of 7.4% compared to 2007.

At present the Singapore Tourism Board is seeking ideas to develop a new tourism map, these includes marketing and surveys of public opinion as it aims to increase the number of visitor arrivals to 17 million and to raise a tourism receipts to S$30 billion by 2015.

In 2005, the medical tourism in Singapore booms, attracting about 200,000 overseas patient. The Singapore Medicine is a multi-agency government initiative that aims to serve 1 million foreign patients annually by 2012 and generate 3 billion US dollar revenue. The countries attracts patients due to its world-class medical facilities, fluency in English and familiar infrastructure to westerners. Medical surgery, cosmetic surgery, dental tourism, alternative medicine and health spas are all supported by finest surgeons, mostly trained in US, and state-of-the-art facilities.