Author Description

Singapore has achieved remarkable economic success for the past few decades and experienced rapid and sustained economic growth. However, the onset of COVID-19 completely altered the nation’s economic landscape. In a matter of months, Singapore's GDP and tourism rates plummeted to an all-time low while unemployment rates surged to their highest in ten years, sending Singaporeans into a state of shock and utter pandemonium. The facts and the unfathomable results speak for themselves. Is Singapore's vaunted economy truly as invulnerable as everyone claimed? In A Nation’s Renaissance, Zery exposes the fault lines of Singapore's open and heavily trade-dependent economy during a global pandemic like COVID-19.Zery recommends potential solutions to help Singapore recover from this pandemic by leading readers through a two-pronged quantitative and qualitative study. On the quantitative side, Zery proposes a framework to evaluate the impacts of COVID-19 on various business sectors in Singapore. Using data and data mining techniques from one of the most popular social media sources, Twitter, Zery constructs public sentiment and attention indexes to capture public opinion toward COVID-19. He then develops sector indexes representing the performances of major industries in Singapore during the pandemic. Finally, Zery offers a step-by-step analysis of how he compared the opinion indexes to the sector indexes to show how severely each business sector was impacted by COVID-19. On the qualitative side, Zery conducted interviews with CEOs and other business leaders to add their insights, opinions and experiences for a deeper understanding of the pandemic’s impact on various businesses in Singapore. Through these quantitative and qualitative comparisons, Zery caps A Nation's Renaissance with insights drawn from observations and proposes a path for Singapore's economic renewal.