The Republic is also the only country in the region that the IMF expects to keep shrinking next year, albeit marginally, and most other economies will see flat or weak growth.

These dire forecasts were released in the IMF's latest regional economic outlook, launched on Wednesday at the MAS Building.

In the report, the IMF also sharply downgraded its growth predictions for most other economies in the Asia-Pacific region.

Singapore saw the biggest downward revision, said IMF representative Joshua Felman, who was in town to present the report. Last November, the IMF projected that Singapore's economy would shrink by 1.4 per cent this year.

'If you look around the region, what you see is the countries that have been hit hardest in the crisis have two characteristics: They are the most open economies and they are the ones that specialise in manufacturing,' said Mr Felman.

'Singapore fits well under both categories, and that's why we expect that the decline in output this year is really going to be quite sizeable.'

But he stressed that 'a lot of the forecast comes from what has already taken place in the fourth quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year'.

Singapore's economy shrank by 16.4 per cent quarter-on-quarter in the fourth quarter of last year and by a further 19.7 per cent in the first quarter of this year.

These record contractions prompted the Government to downgrade its own forecasts last month, and it is now projecting a decline of 6 per cent to 9 per cent for the full year.

Read the full report in Thursday's edition of The Straits Times.