Singapore raises 2025 GDP growth forecast to around 4%

Upgrade follows better-than-expected Q3 showing, but pace expected to ease in 2026

- Ovais Subhani Senior Business Correspondent

Singapore sharply raised its 2025 economic growth forecast after a better-than-expected performance in the third quarter of the year, but expects the pace of expansion to ease in 2026 on US tariff effects.

The gross domestic product (GDP) growth forecast was raised to “around 4 per cent” from the 1.5 per cent to 2.5 per cent range projected in August by the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI).

In its first forecast for 2026, MTI said the economy is likely to grow by a slower 1 per cent to 3 per cent.

“I think the risk factors are real,” said Permanent Secretary for Trade and Industry Beh Swan Gin at a media briefing on Nov 21. “We continue to be concerned that there could always be a re-escalation of the trade tensions.”

MTI’s 2025 growth upgrade comes after the economy grew 4.2 per cent year on year in the third quarter, higher than its earlier estimate of 2.9 per cent.

On a seasonally adjusted quarterly basis, the economy grew 2.4 per cent in the third quarter, faster than the 1.7 per cent expansion in the previous three months.

MTI said GDP growth for the first three quarters of 2025 averages at 4.3 per cent year on year. That average is just shy of the 4.4 per cent growth Singapore achieved in the whole of 2024.

Expectations of a surge in GDP had risen after factory output returned to expansion territory with a 16.1 per cent year-on-year surge in September, a rebound from August’s revised 9 per cent drop, data from the Economic Development Board showed in October.

The figure was well above the 7.5 per cent rise forecast by economists in a Bloomberg poll.

Meanwhile, non-oil domestic exports (NODX) jumped 22.2 per cent from a year ago in October, from a revised 7 per cent expansion in September, data from Enterprise Singapore showed on Nov 17.