Skill up to keep Singapore competitive

THE latest country competitiveness report as well as a couple of business survey reports released over the past week show that Singapore's core strengths of infrastructure, transparent policymaking, prudent fiscal management, and a stable and clean government remain intact.

However, the findings also point clearly to a separate and worrying trend: that Singapore's competitiveness is slowly being eroded by two main factors - property costs and labour shortages.

In the latest Asean Business Outlook Survey of American companies in the region, US firms here again cited the lack of low-cost labour, and high housing and office lease costs as their top three concerns in Singapore. These have been their top woes since 2011. But with property costs already easing from their peak, labour in particular seems to be the bugbear of the Singapore economy. Indeed, the survey of US firms found that their level of dissatisfaction with the cost of labour here has worsened by 19 per cent since 2009. And it's only in Singapore that labour woes came up as an issue; US businesses in the other nine Asean economies roundly cited the availabil…