
According to preliminary estimates from the country’s Ministry of Trade, Singapore recorded the fastest rate of growth since the third quarter of 2022, with 2.8% growth in the fourth quarter of 2023—a sharp increase from the 1% growth that was recorded in the third quarter.
Singapore’s Gross domestic product will see an extension of around 1% to 3% in 2024, as per estimates by the nation’s trade and industry ministry.
This was a sharp increase from the 1% growth kept in the second from last quarter, and the fastest pace of growth since the second from last quarter of 2022.
On a quarter-on-quarter occasionally changed premise, the economy grew by 1.7%, a bigger extension than the 1.3% in the second from last quarter.
The economy increased by 1.2 percent in 2023, down from 3.6 percent in 2022. The MTI had predicted that the economy would grow by “around 1%” in November 2023, and this was in line with what they had expected.
In his New Year’s message on January 1, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said the country “avoided a recession” in 2023. He described the year as “challenging,” citing a “troubled” international environment, such as the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, as well as tensions between the U.S. and China.
He added that despite this, “households are still feeling the pressure of higher cost of living, though inflation is gradually coming down.”
Singapore narrowly avoided a technical recession in 2023 after recording a 0.1% quarter-on-quarter growth in the second quarter, following a 0.3% contraction in the first quarter. A technical recession is commonly defined as two straight quarters of GDP contraction.
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Most eminently, Singapore’s manufacturing sector, which contains around 20% of its economy and the country’s biggest sector, extended by 3.2% year-on-year in the final quarter, switching from the 4.7% constriction in the past quarter.
Before the turnaround in the final quarter of 2023, the manufacturing sector had experienced consecutive declines year-over-year for the first three quarters of the year.
The ministry expressed growth in the sector was because of output expansions across all clusters, with the exception of the precision engineering cluster.
In November, MTI estimate that Singapore’s Gross domestic product will see a growth of around 1% to 3% in 2024, adding that major worldwide economies like the U.S. will probably sluggish in the first half of the year, before picking up gradually in the second half of the year.
Credit: CNBC news