GIC–MOE Economics Experience 2025

I was selected to attend the GIC–MOE Economics Experience at GIC's headquarters in December 2025. The programme brought together pre-university students to examine how Singapore approaches long-term investment and economic resilience. I went in expecting a standard overview of how the Sovereign Wealth Fund works. What I found went well beyond that.

The session on Singapore's national reserves reframed something I thought I understood. Reserves, as GIC Chief Economist Dr Prakash Kannan explained in the session titled 'Reserves, GIC and Securing Singapore's Financial Future', are not simply a savings buffer. They are intergenerational commitments, decisions made by one generation that shape the options available to the next. His point about navigating uncertainty was the one that stayed with me most: the answer to a more volatile world is not better prediction, but better scenario analysis and institutional resilience. That is a different kind of thinking from what most economics education prepares you for.

The Sustainability Session and the 'Read the News Like an Investor' workshop were, as I saw it, asking a version of the same question: how do you make good decisions when the picture is incomplete? Whether that means separating short-term noise from long-term structural change or recognising that climate risk is already embedded in long-horizon investment decisions, the answer has always been about judgement rather than certainty.

I came away thinking about economics differently. Not as a subject with clean answers, but as a discipline of trade-offs and long-term thinking. The decisions that shape a country's resilience are rarely obvious, and they are never made solely for the present. That idea carried more weight here than it had before. Knowing how to reason through uncertainty, rather than wait for it to resolve, felt like the most honest and useful thing I took away from the day.