Embracing globalisation, pursuing FTAS critical to Singapore's survival: health minister

Embracing globalization and pursuing free trade agreements (FTAs) are key to Singapore’s existence, health minister Ong Ye Kung said on Tuesday, asserting that the country is too small to live on its own and needs to tap global markets to earn a living and be self-reliant.

Ong was addressing parliament on the FTAs, which are trade pacts inked between two or more countries to ease the flow of goods and services.

Singapore is a country that is too small to live on its own, and which needs to tap global markets to earn a living and be self-reliant, he said.

While it has no natural resources, Singapore does have its geographical location, which is its ''one precious natural endowment'', he added.

''It is a lasting advantage, but one which requires us to work very hard to realize and sustain. If we succeed, it helps compensate for our lack of size,'' The Straits Times quoted Ong as saying.

The country's strategic position has allowed it to capture trade flows through the Strait of Malacca and Singapore, as well as to connect many countries in the East and the West, enabling home-grown port operator PSA to become the largest container transshipment port in the world, the minister said.

Singapore's port now sustains about 160,000 jobs.

Ong, who is a former transport minister, said Singapore has also grown into an aviation node, asserting that Changi airport was one of the busiest airports in the world and supported 190,000 jobs before Covid-19 struck.

Good international connections have allowed Singapore to build up its manufacturing and service sectors too. Manufacturing, which accounts for about one-fifth of the country's gross domestic product, supports 440,000 jobs and services employs more than 170,000 people, he said.

Singapore is also growing into a center for technology, research, and development, with many global tech firms choosing the country to set up their regional or global innovation centers, he said.

He said the country has built a network of 26 FTAs, and the India-Singapore Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) is one of them.

Ong earlier in his speech said he would explain the importance of FTAs and address false allegations by the Progress Singapore Party that CECA has given Indian professionals, managers and executives a free hand to work in Singapore.

Singapore's network of FTAs is not just a major selling point for the government to persuade investors to come and do business, but is also fundamentally important to the country because it needs the world to ''earn a living'', he said.

Ong said trade pacts require countries to remove or lower tariffs on all trade between partners, which is of ''tremendous benefit'' to Singapore.

Any attack on FTAs undermines the fundamentals of Singapore's existence, all the sectors the pacts support, and the hundreds of thousands of Singaporean jobs created in these sectors, he said.

''If we accept the basic reality that Singapore needs the world to earn a living, then we would realize the fundamental importance of all our FTAs. They are a keystone of the economic super-structure we have built. We could not have advanced the welfare of Singaporeans to the degree we have without FTAs. We cannot take any of this for granted,'' he said.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)