Singapore: The friendship between Singapore and India will now open a new door of opportunities for the youth. This can lead to a boom in jobs in both countries. Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam said on Thursday that despite the revival of industrial policies in the world’s major economies, India and Southeast Asia are well prepared for a new era of opportunity, equality and stability. During a dinner ceremony organized on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), considered to be the think tank of the National University of Singapore, Tharman Shanmugaratnam said that working with other responsible powers, both countries have the potential to strengthen multilateralism and despite its shortcomings, it has been a system that has served both rich and poor countries well for decades.

Tharman expressed hope that relations between Singapore and India will continue to move forward. The Singapore president said industrial policies such as tax breaks and subsidies to promote domestically owned industries were returning at a rate not seen since the 1960s and 1970s, even though these policies had largely failed then. He cited the example of the 2,500 industrial policy interventions the International Monetary Fund has listed in 2023, two-thirds of which were aimed at harming foreign interests.

India a great place for investment

Tharman told about 180 guests who analysed Singapore’s diplomatic-commerce relations with South Asia and considered India a great place for investment and a consumer-driven market that such interventions by governments are not being made because of any powerful new evidence or reassessment of the factors that drive prosperity, but through “exclusion and retaliatory actions”. He said the result is a world where competition is volatile, and the business and investment environment is changeable and unpredictable.