Remember that movie, crazy rich asianIt begins with the manager of a luxury hotel in London making snide remarks towards a Singaporean mother and her children. In a classic example of British racist prejudice, the manager told them, why don’t you try Chinatown. Distraught, the mother called her husband, who solved the problem – by buying the hotel her family was trying to check out.
That view tells you everything about Singapore’s wealth. This reinforced a certain image of the city-state. Singapore – Everything is shiny, everyone is happy. This is a country where a popular slogan was created around the idea of material wealth. Called the “5Cs”, it defines Singaporeans’ aspirations – cash, country club membership, car, credit card and condo. Many people in other countries also want/have these things. Only Singapore coined a slogan around it.
as well as…
- The weather is good. Due to its geography, the equatorial monsoon region of Southeast Asia is never too hot or too cold.
- Singapore’s prosperity is the subject of global envy. At $141,500, it
per capita income In PPP terms (a fairer measure than nominal dollar figures) it is second only to Luxembourg globally. In Asia, it is the richest country. - It has the highest number of millionaires in the world, that is, the highest number of millionaires per square kilometer.
- It hosts global companies, who love Singapore’s low taxes, top-class infrastructure, hassle-free regulation (it takes one day to incorporate a company).
- The city-state is ranked 5th in the list of global startup hubs.
This is by no means a comprehensive list of things that affect Singapore.
But…Singapore isn’t all shiny, happy.
Driving on a scenic road from Changi Airport to a world-class hotel, then from there to dining in a world-class restaurant (Singapore hosts five of the world’s top 100 restaurants) an affluent visitor would probably Might not have seen it, or even know about it. – there is povertySome of it deep, in Singapore. And it’s a problem that is likely to intensify as the city-state, like many wealthy countries, is aging.
Poverty line, what is it?
Most countries define a poverty line, a level of income/expenditure that separates the poor from the non-poor. There is a good reason for this. The poverty line allows policy makers to better target those who need help most. There is a poverty line in India, there is a poverty line in America and most of the countries also have a poverty line. Singapore does not.
Why? The Singapore government’s approach, as written by Arabella Wu in a London School of Economics research paper (“Inequality in Singapore: The Hidden Poor”), is to “reward citizens commensurate with the work done”. As far as economically vulnerable citizens are concerned, the government wants “citizens… to protect themselves… to do it themselves”.
If this is your view of poverty, then obviously there would be no official poverty line. Naturally, there is no official count of poor people either.
reality through research
Since the government is not defining poverty, researchers have had to work with other data. A brilliant research paper (“A Handbook on Inequality, Poverty and Unmet Social Needs in Singapore”), written by Katherine J Smith, John A Donaldson, Sanushka Mudaliar, Mumtaz MD Kadir and Lam Keong Yeoh, draws on a separate study by one of the authors. Gives quotes. , who used expenditure survey data. According to that study, “There are 110,000 to 140,000 households in Singapore that fit the definition of absolute poverty… These include the working poor, the unemployed poor and poor retired households”.
Absolute poverty is defined as an economic situation where an individual or family does not earn enough to meet basic needs.
In a small country (population over 6 million), 140,000 households, that is, about 560,000 people (reasonably assuming 4 people per household), is not a vanishingly small number. You would not imagine going to Singapore, there are more than 5.5 lakh people living in absolute poverty.
Economists also use a concept called relative poverty – a measure that reflects the standard of living relative to the standard of living of people earning an average wage (an average is defined as the middle value of a sequence of numbers, which Arranged in ascending or descending order).
By this measure, according to the booklet cited above, 25% to 30% of Singaporeans live in relative poverty. The same research suggests that many middle-class families in Singapore have faced “stagnant wages and rising costs of living”. This double blow falls on the middle class and the poor, who are hit harder in many countries including India. But this is also true for that island of gleaming high-rise buildings.
In a report on poverty and inequality in Singapore, the BBC had this to say: “The city-state, home to some of the highest-paid ministers in the world, is sometimes a place of extreme contrasts, with shiny condominiums and huge facades just a stone’s throw away. Are similar to.” Move out of one-room rental apartments inhabited by elderly and blue-collar families.
The same BBC report also cited two local studies, which concluded that in multiracial Singapore, it is not race but class that has become the deepest social fault line.
same old story
Poverty, absolute or relative, and intense income inequality In Singapore, almost the same reasons can be traced that have led to similar results in other countries. Policy focus on maintaining high GDP growth, low corporate taxes to attract investment, emphasis on meritocracy and transition from old economy to knowledge economy. Well implemented, as the Singapore government has done, this set of policies can produce dazzling economic performance – but it can also create an underclass that becomes trapped in a web of deprivation. And the problem gets worse, as it does in Singapore, when a society begins to age. The elderly poor face the worst kind of poverty.
None of this invalidates Singapore’s success story. But all this tells us about Singapore that most people don’t know exists.
to say All Singaporeans are crazy, rich are crazy, and full of rich ironies.
