Foreign manpower “helps local firms maintain competitiveness”

SMU Vice President, Business Development and External Relations, Associate Professor Annie Koh considered whether Singapore has benefitted from economic growth generated by the services sector in which 41 per cent of Singapore's foreign workers work. She said: "Because we only get aggregated data, we really don't know how much of that real wage rate is going to the local talent which has been contributing to the driving of that growth in GDP.” “If a large part of our growth comes from the services sector and the services sector is largely dominated by high-end talent from outside the country, then maybe a large chunk of the mean wage is not really going to a lot of the locals."