SINGAPORE'S main exports fell for the fourth straight month in August as shipments for both electronic and non-electronic goods tumbled, the government said on Wednesday.

A slowing global economy hurt exports to Singapore's key markets such as the United States and Europe, the trade promotion body International Enterprise (IE) Singapore said.

Release of the figures came after turbulence in global financial markets intensified with the collapse this week of Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers.

A slowdown will hurt demand for Asian-made goods and reduce expansion in a region the Asian Development Bank says will account for more than a fifth of global growth this year.

'With the crisis in the US, it can only mean that there will be even less demand for Asia's exports,' Tomo Kinoshita, chief economist for Asia outside Japan at Nomura Holdings in Hong Kong told Bloomberg. 'European economies are also affected, and we remain pessimistic on the growth outlook.'

Singapore's shipments of non-oil domestic exports (NODX), a key gauge of the trade-led economy - dropped 14 per cent in August from the same month last year, worsening from the 5.8 per cent dip in July, IE Singapore said.

The contraction was bigger than the eight percent shrinkage projected by a Dow Jones Newswires poll of analysts.

Exports of electronic goods fell 19 per cent year-on-year in August, continuing a decline that has been running since February 2007, IE Singapore said.

The drop was 'largely due to weaker sales of consumer electronics, integrated circuits, disk drives and telecommunications equipment,' it added.

Non-electronics exports also fell 9.6 per cent, led by pharmaceuticals which were down 45.2 per cent.

Non-electronics shipments, which include petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals, fell 9.6 per cent in August from a year earlier. Petrochemical exports also declined 9.6 per cent.

Non-oil sales to the European Union, Singapore's largest overseas market, fell 26.9 per cent in August. Shipments to the US, its second-biggest market, dropped 30.2 per cent, while exports to China slid 13.4 per cent from a year earlier.

On a month-on-month seasonally adjusted basis, NODX was up 2.0 per cent in August, compared with the 2.3 per cent decline in July. -- AFP.