Manufacturing in Singapore will never be the economic engine of growth again. Singapore has to find something else that it can be very good at. The trouble is nobody knows what that is. The govt does not have the answer and neither does anyone else. The world's foremost economic consultants wouldn't be able to provide the magic formula for growth either.
You take 2 million Singaporean Chinese, add some Malays, some Indians and a whole bunch of 2nd rate foreigners and give them 695 sqkm and zero natural resources to work with and try to figure out how to sustain an economy to support a first world standard of living for everyone. It simply isn't possible.
One of issue is that sinkieland is forever jumping from on fad to another, and in past decade, tried to be a hub of anything. Electronics, oil refinery, semi-con, dot com, bio science, media, education, finance. Young people are strongly encouraged to go into certain fields, depending on the fad of the day; in the 90s it was engineering, then computer science, followed by bio science etc. University places were heavily manipulated to force the top quartile of each cohort to study certain fields. End up when the fad dies, so many graduates found themselves in the wrong place, and become master of none.
The problem is that the PAP is too greedy and impatient, always wanting to get into the latest, hottest, greatest stuff. Thus wasting so much local talent in one fad after another.
The government could have identified certain evergreen fields such as medicine, energy, law etc. and allow as many students as they can find to specialise in these fields. At the same time, GIC and temasick to concentrate their fire power in these fields, and buy into many of these companies to influence them to employ sinkies.