Emergency procurement and responses to COVID-19: The case of Singapore

Abstract

As one of the busiest trade and travel hubs in the world, Singapore quickly became the worst affected of all countries by COVID-19 in the very early stages of the pandemic. For example, on 5 February 2020, two weeks after the unprecedented lockdown in Wuhan by the Central Government of China, Singapore had the highest infection rate (24 cases out of a population of 5 million) in the world, higher than China (20,502 cases out of a population of 1.5 billion).1 Alongside the health emergency, Singapore also had to cope with another emergency as countries around the world, in a fanatic scramble to fight the pandemic, resorted to restrictions on exports and imports, suspension of international transportation of both goods and people, and the invocation of various emergency powers and exceptions as justifications. As a country with the world's highest trade to GDP ratio at 400 per cent,2 Singapore sees trade as its "lifeline"3 and, with the domino effects of more and more trade restrictions being introduced around the world, the health emergency quickly escalated into a trade emergency threatening not only the prosperity of "the little red dot",4 but even its very survival.