ABSTRACT
Singapore is the world’s fourth largest port and may become the third largest. Large quantities of oil are imported, refined and sold for bunkering, exported. Singapore’s economy was booming until the recent oil crisis hit the republic’s best customers—the United States, Japan, and Indonesia. Singapore is an entrepot trading port and a country with few raw materials of its own. Singapore produces and consumes just over a million tons of cement annually. Singapore has very little mineral industry apart from its very important oil-refining industry. Oil exploration, where Americans are prominent, was also having difficulty. By mid-1976, about one-fourth of the 3,500 Americans in the oil community had left Singapore. Singapore has good wharfs and roads for ship landings and truck transport of bulk materials. Singapore operates on a liquid-fuel energy economy. The construction of the long-delayed “Sumitomo” petrochemical complex in Singapore was expected to get the go-ahead by mid-1977, and this should give a major boost to the economy.
