Let’s hope your boss likes you and you’re ready to shop till you drop. For that’s the only way to save jobs in Singapore. The realization hit me when I read the bad news about exports plunging to record lows. That threatens to bring down the entire economy because the domestic market did not account for even 10 percent of the GDP in 2007. (Total figures not yet available for last year.) Check the Ministry of Trade and Industry's annual statistics page.
What made me check?
The news that Singapore’s non-oil exports tumbled 35 percent to 10 billion Singapore dollars ($6.6 billion), a 22-year-old low, in January, according to the Guardian and the International Herald Tribune. Those dollar figures are missing in the Straits Times and Channel NewsAsia reports. Without those figures I wouldn’t have understood how bad things are.
The International Herald Tribune does mention that exports account for two-thirds of Singapore’s gross domestic product (GDP). But that’s an understatement.
Non-oil domestic exports alone made up 70.5 percent of Singapore’s GDP in 2007. Non-oil domestic exports – that is, exports of goods and services produced in Singapore – contributed 171.63 billion Singapore dollars ($112.3 billion) to the GDP, which amounted to 243.16 billion Singapore dollars ($159.1 billion) in 2007. Oil domestic exports – that is, oil products processed in Singapore – accounted for another 63.27 billion Singapore dollars. Add up the two and they total 234.9 billion Singapore dollars.
So the domestic market accounted for only 8.26 billion Singapore dollars or about 3.4 percent of the GDP.
With domestic consumption so low, the Singapore economy will simply crumble if exports continue to freefall. As they are doing now. Oil domestic exports fell even more sharply, by 46 percent, in January, according to the trade promotion body, International Enterprise (IE) Singapore.
If anyone outside Singapore reads this, he or she may wonder why I keep harping on domestic exports. Because Singapore also re-exports. “All goods which are exported in the same form as they have been imported without any transformation” are considered “re-exports”, according to the Singapore Statistics Department. “Repacking, sorting or grading, marking and the like are not considered as undergoing the process of transformation.”
Re-exports generated another 215.7 billion Singapore dollars in 2007.
So Singapore exported a total of 450.6 billion dollars' worth of goods and services in 2007. That is 200 billion Singapore dollars more than the GDP. That’s amazing. Hong Kong is the only other place I know where exports exceed GDP. I blogged about it last year.
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