Singapore
Benchmarking history
By quitting industrial land development, JTC marks an end to the state's old industrial revolution. By Seah Chiang Nee.
Nov 23, 2005

The Government has announced it will stop developing industrial land after 37 years, marking an irreversible end to a part of history that provided Singapore's golden economic era.

The Jurong Town Council (JTC), had been developing and managing sites since 1968 responsible for Singapore's industrial revolution.

It has announced it will stop the exercise and divest properties worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is no surprise.

Singapore's industrial revolution has been beating a hasty retreat during the past five years as a result of globalisation and the IT revolution.

Manufacturing, which made up 66.1 percent of the economy at its peak in 2000, fell to 26% last year, mostly consisting of higher-value products like chemicals and biotech.

On the other hand, the service sector has been growing to hit 68 per cent of the economy last year.

The new economic activities, unlike the old manufacturing industries, generally do not require large sites that JTC was dishing out.

Observers notice that during the last five years, vacant JTC sites in Jurong and elsewhere had steadily become a common sight as demand fell.

With the advent of the information age Singapore is following the general de-industrialisation of the west, shifting from an industrial era in the 1990s.

In the United States, the end of the industrial age had raised unemployment, crime and social disorder.

One report said: "The decline of kinship as a social institution, which has been going on for more than 200 years (of the industrial age), accelerated sharply in the second half of the 20th century.

Marriages and births declined and divorce soared, and one out of every three children in the US and more than half of all children in Scandinavia were born out of wedlock."

Singapore may not be able to entirely avoid these long-term social trends.
By Seah Chiang Nee