By Alisha Gill and Donald Low The 2013 Budget points to a slowly changing governmental approach to Singapore’s social compact. More than anything else, it shows a government that is trying to find a new balance between its long-standing emphasis on individual responsibility and incentives with a greater willingness to expand social protection and increase the progressivity of […]

By Daniel Yap Where once businesses were all caught up with the White Paper’s plan to slow down foreign worker growth (including some short-sighted comments addressed in my earlier article), Budget 2013 has them focused on a new potential deal-breaker – a yet-undefined Singaporean-first HR policy, probably some form of labour market testing that requires companies to prove […]

The following is adapted from a speech Mr Devadas at the Women in Community conference at the Singapore Management University, 2nd March 2013. By Devadas Krishnadas The future is a something we should all care about but about which we are badly equipped to think about.  This is because of the way we are cognitively hard […]

By Daniel Yap So we hear the Restaurant Association of Singapore (RAS) prophesying doom for the industry and pain for Singapore if the foreign worker tap is tightened. It is not the only association to do so. Maybe they are just trying to preempt the reaction to a price increase. Perhaps I am being sensitive, but what chilled […]

By Damien Huang SINGAPORE is almost being held to ransom by the issue of immigration and foreign workers, with the general public wary of their impact their numbers have on infrastructure and way of life while business associations and employers threaten to leave the country if foreign worker restrictions are not relaxed. While the government has […]

By Devadas Krishnadas Christopher Chablis and Daniel Simons are authors of the book The Invisible Gorilla. The book is based on an experiment they conducted several years ago at Harvard. In the study, they asked subjects to watch a video of a group of people playing basketball. They set them the task of counting the number […]

By Valerie Koh In the Punggol East by-election held on 26 January, the People’s Action Party (PAP) lost the single-member constituency to Ms Lee Li Lian of the Workers’ Party (WP). The PAP’s vote share decreased by a stunning 10.81% while the WP’s increased by 13.49%. What was the cause of this sharp change in support? […]

By Gillian Koh SINGAPORE’S population figure has been a hot-button issue, heavily politicised since the 2006 Mid-Term Concept Plan Review when the Urban Redevelopment Authority announced it was looking at 6.5 million people as a planning parameter 40 years hence. This week’s White Paper on Population citing a 6.9 million population projection by 2030 has naturally […]

By Donald Low Meritocracy is widely regarded as a core principle of governance in Singapore. Basic disagreement over it was also one of the reasons why Singapore separated from Malaysia. The meritocracy principle – that we try to equalise opportunities not outcomes, and that we allocate rewards on the basis of an individual’s merit or his […]

By Christopher Gee and Yap Mui Teng The National Population and Talent Division (NPTD)’s much-awaited publication of the White Paper entitled “A Sustainable Population for a Dynamic Singapore” is billed as a roadmap of the government’s long-term population strategies.  The White Paper is now to be debated in Parliament, following which enabling policies may emerge from various ministries […]

By Devadas Krishnadas In 1992, Mr Bill Clinton decisively and surprisingly defeated Mr George H W Bush in the American Presidential elections. Mr Bush, the scion of political aristocracy, was a highly experienced politician who had just won a major victory in the first Gulf war. Mr Clinton, a generation younger, was from a poor family […]

The following are highlights of the Singapore Perspectives 2013 Conference on 28 January. The report is by the Institute of Policy Studies, the organiser of the conference. The Prime Minister (PM) of Singapore, Mr Lee Hsien Loong, engaged in a broad-ranging discussion of the future direction that governance in Singapore might take. In a no […]