An Integrated Systems Approach to Singapore's immigration, Manpower and Higher Education Policies

Yang Peipei

Abstract

Over the past ten years, there have been more and more debates over Singapore government’s policies around immigration, education and employment for which these three areas are believed to be the critical underlying factors affecting Singapore’s economic growth. These topics start to attract even more attention as Singapore’s economy experiencing slowdown in recent times amid the global economic downturn. Among the many alternatives over various key areas, government needs to figure out which policies are more effective in order to maintain Singapore’s competitiveness and ensure the sustainability of its economic growth. This research proposes an integrated system approach which facilitate decision making on adopting various policies related to immigration, education and employment through a combination of System Dynamics and Analytic Hierarchy Process – a multi-criteria decision support tool. This approach starts with incorporating real world data into the System Dynamics model in order to simulate the respective consequences of various policies under two different scenarios. After that, Analytic Hierarchy Process is utilized to compare alternative policies based on their respective performance as reflected by the System Dynamics simulation and judgment of decision makers. Decision analysis through Analytic Hierarchy Process reveals that Singapore government should soften immigration policy and provide more work pass quota for foreigners while at the same time increase the enrollment rate for tertiary education. This thesis demonstrates that the integrated SD-AHP decision support approach proves to be effective in the long-term planning for ensuring sustainability of Singapore’s economic development.