The central bank estimates that Singapore’s GDP will top 6% this year, above the current official estimate of the “upper end of the 4%–6%” range. This is barring a significant setback in activity from a weaker recovery of the global economy, or a surge in locally transmitted coronavirus cases.
Singapore’s economy is likely to stage a better-than-expected recovery this year after posting in 2020 its worst recession on record. This optimism comes as the republic unexpectedly eked out a 0.2% y-o-y growth in the first quarter of the year, reversing three previous quarters of contraction that was caused by the pandemic.
With this, Singapore’s real gross domestic product (GDP) reached 99.6% of its pre-Covid-19 levels, thereby enabling the economy as a whole to almost recoup the output lost in the first half of 2020, notes the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in its biannual economic review released on April 28.
