Comparative Study of Qatar National Vision 2030 and Singapore National Vision 2030 with Reference to Sustainability and Financial Services

The present research compares Qatar and Singapore's national vision blueprints with special reference to environmental sustainability and the role of financial services in this. Both visions offer a multidimensional development framework. Both visions aspire for knowledge driven economies. Both visions assign special attention to environmental and social concerns and sustainability. In this study we compared the salient features of the two visions with special reference to environmental sustainability and the supporting role of financial services. While both economies have a small population and serve as regional investment hubs, they have starkly different economic mainstays. Singapore in its modern history, spanning over five decades, has emerged as one of the worlds' well diversified, service and innovation driven environmentally sustainable countries. Over the last decade, Qatar is working on implementing its national vision for a balanced, sustainable and diversified economy, in the path, the experiences, challenges and opportunities of Singapore can be beneficial. Given the time-frame for this thesis, the research, at a limited scale explored the role of financial services with respect to environmental sustainability. The research draws important inferences based on this comparative analysis. Qatar has made significant progress on its numerous sustainability initiatives. For example, Msheireb is the unique example of utilization of green energy and build ideas and Katara Hills Gardens is the iconic example, where the debris of infrastructure projects has been reused to create hills, meadows and plantation of trees for environmental and cultural sustainability. However, two key findings of this study show that: A) Financial and non-financial businesses can contribute tremendously to economic diversification and environmental sustainability simultaneously. Sustainability reporting is a mandatory listing requirement for companies on the Singapore Stock Exchange; while in Qatar Stock Exchange, it is only voluntary and there is an important opportunity for Qatar to learn from Singapore. B) Civil society can play critical role in innovating Zero Waste solutions for environmental sustainability as is evident from Zero Waste Singapore and there's also an important opportunity for Qatar in this line of experience. Deeper and comparative studies are required as benchmarking of economic transformation could be beneficial for emerging economies like Qatar.