Singapore’s economy roars back with a 14.3% surge in the second quarter from a year ago

SINGAPORE — Singapore recorded its strongest economic growth in 11 years in the second quarter of 2021, rebounding from its worst economic slump on record a year ago due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Southeast Asian economy surged 14.3% in the second quarter compared with the same period a year ago, according to advance estimates by the Ministry of Trade and Industry. That performance slightly exceeded the 14.2% year-on-year jump forecast by analysts in a Reuters poll.

“The strong growth was largely due to the low base in the second quarter of 2020 when GDP fell by 13.3 per cent due to the Circuit Breaker (CB) measures implemented from 7 April to 1 June 2020,” the ministry said in a Wednesday statement.

Circuit breaker refers to the partial lockdown implemented in Singapore, when large parts of the economy were shut to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

But compared with the previous quarter, the economy contracted by 2%, the ministry said. It added that in absolute terms, gross domestic product in the April-to-June period this year remained 0.9% below the second quarter of 2019 — before the pandemic.

Here’s how the different sectors in Singapore performed in the second quarter:

• Goods-producing industries expanded by 22.2% from a year ago, but contracted 2.5% compared with the first quarter.
• Services industries grew 9.8% from a year ago, but contracted 1% compared with the first quarter.
• The key manufacturing sector grew 18.5% compared with the same period a year ago, and contracted by 1.8% from the first quarter.

Singapore saw a resurgence in Covid cases this year, prompting the government to tighten social-distancing measures in early-May. Authorities started to gradually relax those restrictions last month as the number of local infections eases.

Since the beginning of last year, the country has confirmed more than 62,700 cases of the coronavirus and 36 deaths as of Tuesday, health ministry data showed.

The Southeast Asian country has one of the highest vaccination rates globally. More than 70% of its roughly 5.69 million population have received at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine, and over 41% have been fully inoculated, according to CNBC calculations of health ministry data.