“I think it is reasonable to assume that growth going forward over the next five to 10 years will be somewhat lower than growth in the past,” Mr Tharman told the Financial Times in an interview.

“You can’t keep growing at 5, 7, 8 per cent over the next five to 10 years; and it is not advisable to either.”

Mr Tharman’s comments provide the first insight into the thinking of a economic strategy committee set up by Lee Hsien Loong, the prime minister, which is due to report in January on a plan for sustainable long-term growth. Mr Tharman chairs the committee.

Singapore suffered its worst recession since independence as a result of the global financial crisis, with the economy contracting by just under 10 percentage points in the four quarters to March before recovering most of the loss in the six months to September.

The International Monetary Fund expects the economy to contract by 1.7 per cent this year and to grow by 4.3 per cent in 2010. Its forecast for next year is broadly in line with forecasts released by the Monetary Authority of Singapore .

However, Mr Tharman said the likely reduction in trend growth was principally a consequence of the successful transformation of Singapore’s economy over the past four decades, during which incomes have risen to western levels.

“This is not so much due to the crisis and the very real discontinuities in the global economy as much as the fact that the Singapore economy is evolving,” he said.

“These are stylised facts that describe what happened to Europe beyond the tremendous recovery after the war, what happened to Japan, what happened to every other advanced economy,” he added.

“But we are still growing at a trend rate that is faster than advanced economies with a similar per capita economic level, and we think we can still grow at a trend rate that is significantly faster than other countries in the same league.”

Singapore’s gross domestic product per head at current prices is $34,346 according to the IMF – just behind the UK on $35,727 and ahead of some advanced countries, such as New Zealand on $26,932.

Mr Tharman declined to discuss the precise level at which Singapore’s long-term growth trend might settle, except to say that it was expected to be “a shade lower than over the last five to 10 years”. However, he said growth had averaged 5 per cent a year over the last full economic cycle from 2003 to 2008.

Constraints included the difficulty of maintaining high rates of productivity growth in a high-income economy and the impact on labour force growth from a declining birthrate and lower rates of immigration, he said.

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