BREAD: Oh joy, our economy’s bubbling again, says our nation-building press

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

You will notice immediately that the biggest and second-biggest sectors registered declines in the first quarter of 2013. This is worrying, especially when these two are also big generators of employment. Manufacturing provides employment for 14 percent of Singapore citizens and permanent residents in the labour force (“the resident labour force”); it is the second largest employment sector. Wholesale and Retail Trades provide employment for 15 percent of the resident labour force — the largest employment sector.

By contrast, the “star sector”, Finance and Insurance Services, is not only much smaller value-wise, it provides employment for only 7.4 percent of the resident labour force.

It would be much more responsible of a newspaper to ensure that its reporting of data is framed this way.

And what of the statement in the Straits Times, that financial services grew ”about 51 per cent over the previous quarter”? It is probably taken from the press release by the Ministry of Trade and Industry (23 May 2013), which said “On a quarter-on-quarter basis, the sector surged by an annualised rate of 50.6 per cent.” The key words are “annualised rate”. Straits Times omitted them. If you look at the second paragraph of the ministry’s statement, it also mentions “seasonally-adjusted annualised basis” — which tells us that it is quite a different beast from blithely suggesting that this sector was 51 percent bigger in the first quarter of 2013 compared to the fourth quarter of 2012.


- http://yawningbread.wordpress.com/20...uilding-press/


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