The Singapore economy expanded a faster than expected 1.8% on a year-on-year basis in the final three months of 2016, according to advance estimates released by the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) on Tuesday.    This was more than the revised 1.2% growth in the third quarter.

    On a quarter-on-quarter seasonally adjusted basis, gross domestic product (GDP) grew 9.1%, marking a reversal from the 1.9% contraction in the July to September period and dodging a technical recession defined as two straight quarters of declines in economic output.

    This quicker-than-expected pace of growth brought full-year GDP growth to 1.8%, above the government's forecast for 2016 growth to be between 1.0 and 1.5%.

    However, this marks Singapore's weakest annual rate of growth since 2009, when the economy was hit by the global financial crisis and shrank 0.6%. Last year, the economy grew 2%. Strong improvements in the manufacturing and services sectors helped to underpin growth in the final quarter of 2016. 

    The manufacturing sector, which makes up a fifth of Singapore’s economy, expanded 6.5% on a year-on-year basis, way higher than the 1.7% growth in the previous quarter. Growth was primarily driven by the electronics and biomedical manufacturing clusters, even as the transport engineering and general manufacturing clusters continued to contract, MTI said.