Singapore facing a manpower crisis in its burgeoning high-tech sector

"Everybody is in competition. Even Silicon Valley worries about not getting enough people. We need world-class management teams and talent, and we are not able to generate enough. We have so many babies a year and we get them all well educated in school and university, but you need scintillating talent."

The fact is, said Singapore's deputy prime minister, Brigadier General (BG) Lee Hsien Loong, "we are all in the same game". Like Ireland, with a similar population, Singapore is finding it hard to get enough qualified workers for its fast-growing ITbased economy. "You can produce more, you can train your own people properly, which is what we are trying to do, but you never have enough," said the deputy prime minister.

The crisis in finding local talent has been exacerbated by a falling birth rate - 1.48 per woman when 2.1 is needed to sustain the population level - which raises fundamental questions about future growth and the ability to support elders.

So in contrast to China, Singapore is promoting bigger families. Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong announced last month a scheme of "baby bonuses" of up to £7,500 annually for six years for a second child, and twice as much for a third. "But we are pushing uphill," admitted BG Lee. "In Singapore the wife is now employed, she's not just at home minding house. She wants a career, she wants fulfilment and an interesting life, and if she is a successful woman, she also wants to make sure her children are well looked after and well brought up," which discourages her from having more children. To service its new technology, Singapore has had to follow an open-door policy. It is facing competition for investment and talent from other fast-modernising Asian cities like Shanghai and Tianjin. "We are also competing against cities in Europe, certainly in the financial industry, and in technology we are competing with San Jose in California.

What we have to do is try to offer people something in Singapore which you can't get easily elsewhere."

He listed the city's unique living and working environment, low pollution, law and order, good schools, first-class services and facilities such as telecommunications, banking and air transport, and an established network of businesses. Singapore is also opening up its financial sector to try to overtake Hong Kong as the regional asset management centre of choice.

Retraining workers in bluecollar industries is also a major part of government strategy to fill the gaps. The city is being wired up fast to make IT part of normal life. About half of Singapore homes have access to the Internet. Five-year-olds in kindergarten spend two hours a week playing on PCs and all schools will soon have one PC for every two students. Adapting has also meant changing concepts of education. "We've got a project called `Thinking Schools, Learning Nation' where we're trying to reduce the curriculum by maybe 10-15 per cent, free up some time, invest more resources in getting good teachers and get the children not only to digest the stuff but also to venture on their own and explore new projects together," he said.

Singapore's Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr Yeo Cheow Tong, emphasised that people had to recognise digitilisation as the wave of the future, and the Government had to ensure as small a digital divide as possible between those who were Internet savvy and those who were not, as the latter would be left out. "We would definitely welcome companies from Ireland that have know-how in this area to locate here, and use Singapore as the launching pad for the region. The scope is tremendous."

Impressed by US economic success, Singapore's educators are now looking to America for higher education models. Having observed how indisciplined adolescents in the United States became the world's top computer entrepreneurs, the Singapore National University is even building garages in an avenue to be called Techno Street for young inventors eager to imitate whizz kids like the co-founders of Apple Computer, who started in a back-yard garage. Singapore's recovery from the Asian crisis was largely powered by manufacturing, particularly in the semiconductor, telecommunications and IT peripheral industries. The key strategies for continued growth, said BG Lee, are, "education, bringing in talent, maintaining an overall stable environment, investing in IT and of course keeping the politics right".

Maintaining a "critical mass" of infrastructure and services for specific industries like petrochemicals and disc drive manufacture was also important. Despite being a first world economy, Singapore still controls information flow. Domestic satellite dishes are banned and many foreign web sites blocked. The Peoples Action Party (PAP) maintains firm control of both politics and macroeconomic decision making. Asked if Singapore would respond to rapid globalisation by becoming politically more open, BG Lee replied: "I think it will evolve. Whether you have opposition or not, and what role they play, depends on the generation of Singaporeans who are active and in leadership positions. We've been lucky in that many Singaporeans, whether in the party or not, agreed generally on the way forward. Whether you can maintain that (consensus) in a different environment is hard to say.

"Our objectives are not very ambitious, we're just trying to make a living for ourselves, in the sense that we can prosper, work together, upgrade ourselves. If we look towards our resources and our defences then we can cope with anything which may come in our direction."