a) East - West Geopolitical conflict (USA and China are the most obvious), with the situation regarding Taiwan and the numerous claims of information theft, hacking, military exercises and espionage raising the tensions in South East Asia every other week.
b) Ukraine - Russia war. This has been going on for over 1 year, and the economic impact has been ever rising costs of food, and other resources like building materials. The threats made on both sides are also very unsettling.
Rainy Days and Mondays
c) Global Warming. We are facing very cold 'winters' or months on end where it rains day in day out. Countries in the temperate zones are facing hotter springs, and summers. The ice caps have melted way beyond what they used to be 50 odd years ago. Fires and floods these last 5 years are commonplace in places where there were'nt ever before.
Singapore has nothing to sell as far as natural resources. We only have a deep harbour. We cannot and probably never ever be self sufficient because, we cant feed our population anything. We have been first a fishing village some 200 years ago, then a town for entrepot trade between East and West, a manufacturing hub from the 70s to late 90s for Western producers, an IT Hub, a banking centre, a nice place to visit for 3 - 4 days (gaming and all things mad made we have). And that's IT.
These days, we have gone into Advanced Remanufacturing, which is higher value added manufactuting ; with several data centres such as AWS and Google. Numerous pharmaceutical giants have set up shop here, such as Pfizer, Moderna to name just 2. We are a research base for quite a number of biomedical manufcaturers and lately, even the EV makers have set up shop here.
We must remain nimble. We have no choice.
The 4 challenges facing our aging population :
a) Rising costs of living (inflation)
b) Healthcare Consumption - expected to increase with more older people living longer
c) Retirement Adequacy
d) Economic Dynamism
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