Highlights

Singapore’s support system for young families incentivises the nuclear household. This undervalues critical multigenerational care. “It takes a village to raise a child”, we’re told. But when you look at how our housing, childcare, and household benefits are structured, the village Singapore imagines is one where everyone unhelpfully lives in separate flats. Measures such as […]

SINGAPORE: There can hardly be a worse time to ask whether someone is “really Singaporean”. As families waited desperately for news of nine Singaporeans reported missing after the Nepal floods, some people online scrutinised their names and photographs and asked exactly that. Others questioned why Singapore should help them at all. Some said things far […]

SINGAPORE: What should strike Singaporeans about the National Day Rally (NDR) is that the government is changing the logic of family support. The almost S$70,000 (US$55,140) in support for every Singaporean child is simply the most visible expression of the biggest overhaul of family policy in a generation. On Sunday night (Aug 23), Prime Minister […]

SINGAPORE: For the first time, married couples living with children make up less than half of Singapore’s households. The finding, from the latest General Household Survey released on Jun 30, sits alongside two others: More young residents are staying single and families are getting smaller. These shifts, usually discussed through the lenses of marriage, fertility and ageing, can […]

Singaporean Chinese or Chinese Singaporean? Recent events have yanked the distinction back into public consciousness. Today, that question is no longer idle. A rising China with its expanding soft power, Singapore’s falling birth rates, and the naturalisation of immigrants that the Republic relies on to sustain its numbers have together unsettled what separates a Chinese […]

Governments and organisations have long relied on surveys and focus groups to gather and understand public sentiment. Now, artificial intelligence may be changing that – for good and bad. Last year, researchers from Stanford University simulated the personalities of more than 1,000 individuals based on in-depth interviews, and found that these AI profiles could simulate […]

SINGAPORE: Before the consensus conference on local-foreign integration even started, a participant sent us an email. He wanted the Institute of Policy Studies’ research team to know what to expect: He wrote that he intended to be vocal. That he was angry and frustrated. That he wanted to voice his concerns about citizens being neglected, about job […]

Held on 9 March 2026, the first lecture of the 18th IPS-Nathan Lecture Series, titled “Singapore, Biodiversity and a Thriving City”, was delivered by Dr Shawn Lum, Senior Lecturer at the Asian School of the Environment, Nanyang Technological University. The lecture explored Singapore’s environmental transformation, the science of biodiversity conservation, and the social attitudes that […]

Commentators wringing their hands over the state of international affairs these days are fond of quoting (and mangling) the Italian intellectual and philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s famous quotation from a different era: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety […]

In his final IPS-Nathan Lecture, Mr Piyush Gupta, former Chief Executive Officer and Director of DBS Group, turned his attention to Singapore’s financial future. He argued that a new wave of change is underway, driven by blockchain, which has given rise to new financial infrastructures and new forms of digital money, and agentic artificial intelligence […]