Singapore's annual GDP growth beyond 2020 is projected to be between two and three per cent and economists said that Singaporeans will just have to accept the reality of slower growth. SMU School of Economics Associate Dean and Professor of Economics Hoon Hian Teck said: “When we transited from third world to first, from 1965 up to about 1990, it is a period of growth that is qualitatively different from the kind of growth that we can expect going forward. Essentially, the earlier period of growth is what economists call catch up growth. We have since caught up. We are pretty much equal to the US GDP per capita now so we are now a more mature economy but mature economies cannot achieve the five to six per cent growth rate that we could in the past.”