by mncs operating in singapore. • gross national income ( gni ) per capita became the more relevant measure of singapore ’ s income and standard of living than just gdp per capita. the 2020s and 2030s saw the proliferation and convergence of several technological trends that transformed economies and societies globally. • rapid progress in digital and mobile technologies, coupled with advanced biometrics and global wi - fi access, made payments virtually costless and highly secure, precipitating an explosion in the growth of digital commerce and digital finance. • advances in cloud computing, big data analytics, smart sensors and learning machines transformed the provision of consumer and business services, including financial, legal, auditing, consultancy, and logistics. • they also spurred a transformation in the provision of social and public services such as telemedicine, online learning, and congestion control, substantially enhancing efficiency and consumer welfare. singapore was well - positioned for the pervasive digitisation of the global economy that occurred in the 2020s and 2030s, mainly due to two key initiatives that it embarked on in 2015 in the drive towards productivity - led growth : • the first was the concerted national effort to build and deepen skills at all levels through extensive worker retraining programmes and subsequent introduction of the teaching of digital technology across the education system. • the second was the drive to create a smart nation – building critical infrastructure and capabilities in digital and sensor technologies. by 2040, a thriving ideas economy had taken root in singapore, with value - added embedded in ideas rather than physical form. • the creation of economic value was associated increasingly with “ dematerialised products ” such as telecommunications, algorithms, software, design, testing and research. • at the same time, singapore built on its traditional strengths in the ideas economy, namely marketing, branding, and global supply chain management. advances in robotics and 3 - d printing helped to spawn new activities in singapore ’ s offshore facilities in the afez : • production of space vehicles and supersonic jet engines ; • additive manufacturing of components for electric cars and autonomous vehicles. technological advances also transformed the structure of the territorial economy. • cutting - edge biologics to produce drugs for cancer, auto - immune diseases, congenital disorders and dementia emerged as the largest component of manufacturing. • real - time genome sequencing for disease control started from scratch to become one of the fastest growing segments within the territorial economy. • infrastructure financing became the largest contributor to modern services, with singapore - based

andreas dombret : the importance of being competitive speech by dr andreas dombret, member of the executive board of the deutsche bundesbank, at the esmt ( european school of management and technology ) open lecture, esmt, berlin, 20 february 2013. * 1. * * introduction dear professor rocholl ladies and gentlemen i am delighted to have the opportunity to speak to you today here at the esmt. at the time, the decision to set up a private business school in an academic landscape dominated by public institutions met with a certain degree of scepticism. in this regard, esmt was no different from most start - ups. but ten years later, the esmt is doing rather well, and that is much less common among start - ups. failure rates are high among young enterprises, but once the initial phase has been survived, a long period of robust health can be expected. optimism is therefore warranted, and not just because the esmt is entering its teens. one of esmt ’ s main fields of study is in european competitiveness. the results of this research will hardly suffer from a lack of attention. it is now widely agreed upon that persistent gaps in competitiveness were one of the root causes of the current crisis. recognising that fact certainly constitutes progress. nevertheless, although a consensus appears to have emerged concerning how the crisis developed, views still differ on how it should be resolved. that might seem somewhat paradoxical at first. if there really is a consensus that restoring competitiveness is key to overcoming the crisis, how is it that prescriptions for remedying the euro area ’ s woes differ so starkly? in my remarks, i wish to argue that such differences of opinion have their origin largely in a constant tug - of - war between two competing economic objectives : efficiency, in particular motivated by the proper incentives, on the one hand, and distributional issues, on the other. or, to put it more bluntly, one line of argument has to do with how emu ’ s growth engine should be fixed and how it should be made to run more reliably, while the other line of argument is more about who is going to foot the bill – for past and future burdens alike. i do not want to disregard concerns about the scale of such burdens or the social and political costs of bearing them. rather, based on a diagnosis of how the crisis came about, i would like to stress that