Mr Lim Kim San, Executive Chairman of Singapore Press Holdings, Mr Graham Davey, Chief Operating Officer for the Asia Pacific and Middle East Region, DHL Worldwide Express, Mr Hsuan Owyang, Chairman of the Singapore Business Awards Panel of Judges, ladies and gentlemen.

I am pleased to join you this evening for the 14th Singapore Business Awards. In difficult times, awards for business excellence mean a whole lot more; so I must offer special congratulations to this year�s winners.

1998 was a trying year for all of us. For this year, the only thing that can be said with any certainty is that the regional crisis has not yet passed. The immediate future is still fraught with political and economic uncertainties both in our region and in those countries which are our major markets and sources of investment.

The Ministry of Trade and Industry�s forecast of GDP growth for this year reflects this uncertainty: plus or minus one per cent.

In shaping our response to the crisis � everything from rising unemployment to massive business losses � we must distinguish between the short-term and long-term, the here-and-now versus the tomorrows-to-come. To deal with the short-term, the government came up with two cost-cutting packages, to help companies regain competitiveness. It is to our great credit that we have had the tripartite spirit � among employers, unions and the government � to be able to cut wage costs by 15% across the board. Whether these measures will prove enough remains to be seen, of course. We will have to watch how things develop here in our region and in the major world economies.

Dr Richard Hu has also not forgotten the human dimension of this economic downturn. His budget statement for FY 1999/2000 also brings some relief to individuals and families during this period of economic difficulty.

But even more critical than the measures to overcome the current crisis is what we do for the long term. Even before the onset of the crisis, the government had already been consulting with the business community and thinking about what would form the basis of our competitiveness in the 21^st Century. Over the last year, the government has announced various initiatives centred on transforming Singapore into a knowledge based economy. These include Industry 21 and liberalising the financial sector. By the next decade when these initiatives come to fruition, Singapore will be a very different place.

This restructuring of the economy is essential for future growth. We enjoyed sustained growth and rising standards of living for the last three decades because we were able to operate in a niche between developing and developed countries. We provided good value for money: near first world quality at near third world prices.

Our people were able to enjoy a better life while maintaining our competitive edge by striving for greater productivity and by being better organised. But as our costs rose, and as competitors from the developing world in Asia, Latin America and even Europe also climbed the productivity ladder, the comfortable niche that we occupied between developed and developing world began to narrow.

We should continue to strive for higher productivity. Increased productivity will bring steady continuing improvements in our competitiveness. But we should also look beyond productivity to the quantum and discontinuous gains that can be obtained from entrepreneurial activity: new technology, new processes, new products, new markets. We need to look beyond squeezing out more returns from the traditional factors of production of land, labour and capital, and look to kindling the entrepreneurial spirit that can bring about fresh, new combinations of land, labour and capital.

This will require a change in the mindsets of our people and of our attitudes to risk taking. The economic and social climate in Singapore must make it worthwhile for a person to take a risk and strike out on a new path rather than following safe and well-worn pathways. This means creating conditions where success is handsomely recognised and rewarded, while the cost and stigma of failure is not prohibitive.

We will need venture capitalists who know how to direct capital towards budding entrepreneurs with good business ideas, rather than directing capital as we traditionally do, based on whether or not collateral is available. We need to shift our capital allocation more towards those activities that have the highest chance of creating future wealth, rather than allocating capital towards the lowest risk based on the possession of current wealth.

Another far-reaching initiative is our move to become a talent capital. You will have read the robust debate we had in Parliament over whether we should be focusing so much, at this point in time, on attracting foreign talent, or whether we should be focusing instead on helping Singaporeans cope with the crisis.

Part of the confusion has to do with a failure to distinguish between the short term and the long term. It is to be expected that amid rising joblessness, minds are focused on immediate solutions. But in developing Singapore as a talent capital, we are looking beyond the next bend in the road, to when the crisis is behind us.

In the area of manpower, we are not just interested in attracting foreign talent, to the exclusion of our own domestic talent. In fact, what we will be doing for our own people amounts to a fundamental change in our whole attitude to learning.

In our current model, the economic agencies such as EDB create good jobs by attracting investments to Singapore, while the Ministry of Education trains as many Singaporeans as possible to fill these jobs.

In the new paradigm of the knowledge based economy, the Singaporeans that graduate from our education system must be prepared to create their own opportunities rather than expect that there will always be jobs tailor made for them to fill. This requires a new emphasis in our education system on creativity, resourcefulness and the willingness to take risks.

Singaporeans must also be ready to acquire skills and knowledge throughout our lives. Gone are the days when what we left school with was sufficient learning to last us till the end of our days. Nowadays, technology changes more quickly, and we simply live so much longer. We can expect that in the 21^st Century, the cycle time of technology will be even shorter, while life spans will be even longer.

We have progressed from mass primary education to mass secondary education in our early years of independence. We have now moved to mass further education with 85% of each cohort graduating from university, polytechnic or the Institute of Technical Education. Mass continuing education and lifelong learning will be the next great frontier in education. It will be the final piece in our vision of "Thinking Schools, Learning Nation".

The Ministry of Manpower is working closely with my Ministry to address these issues. Let me just say that this concept of lifelong learning is something you will hear more about this year. It will be something aimed very much at Singaporeans, both the young and the old, both pre-employment learning as well as in-employment learning.

Meanwhile, however, we must press ahead to become a talent capital � a city state which not just attracts but also welcomes foreign talent of all kinds. We need as much foreign talent as possible to complement and supplement the energy and ideas of Singaporeans. This is the surest way of pulling ourselves clear of this recession and setting ourselves firmly on the road to future growth.

We must all use this crisis to examine ourselves and our purpose. I would urge companies, and all of you, to do the same. For when we have done this and surmounted the crisis, we will have the confidence to confront the future.

Thank you.