Singapore: Toward the Edge of Innovation Leadership

How can Singapore reach sustained economic growth through innovation and R&D and become a technological leader? To answer this question a growth model is used where economic growth and speed of convergence depends on the distance of an economy from the technological frontier. Singapore is close to the technological frontier and has an innovation-based strategy with a matching economic policy. Singapore''s performance on this strategy is compared with the actual technological leader. The main result of the study is that Singapore has to raise spending on tertiary education, to increase tertiary education attainment and to improve private credit facilitation.