**TRS EDITORIAL PIECE**
At the NUS U@live Forum today, Shanmugam highlighted some of Singapore’s main challenges going into the future.
He said that rising expenditure, coupled with a decline in the number of working adults is likely to be a challenge in Singapore’s future.
He also cautioned that high public spending is a great risk to Singapore, saying that government expenditure will only “mushroom” and is not sustainable in the long run despite it being popular with the masses.
Like many PAP members, Mr Shanmugam is against increasing public spending citing the usual arguments of sustainability.
However, a recent report by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has identified that Singapore spends very little on social spending relative to GDP per capita compared to other nations in the Asia Pacific.
The ADB Report includes a comprehensive analysis of 2009 data on Government social protection programs and it uses a Social Protection Index (SPI) to allow the comparison of the effectiveness of social programs across different countries.
Below is a table contained in the report where different countries are compared by SPI, GDP per capita and social protection expenditure as a percentage of GDP:
It was identified by the ADP report that an SPI of 0.200 is considered an attainable benchmark for middle-income countries in the Asia Pacific region.
Singapore, with GDP per capita of $35 514, is considered a high income country. Despite this, it is still not even at the SPI expected of a middle-income country.
It can also be seen that Singapore spends only 3.5% of GDP on social protection programs compared to 19.2% in Japan and 7.9% in Korea. Even neighbouring Malaysia spends 3.7% of GDP on social protection.
Is Shanmugam suggesting that all these countries with higher social expenditure are heading down an unsustainable path? Except for Japan, all these other countries have a much lower GDP per capita than Singapore, yet they can still afford to spend much more, relatively, on social protection.
Singapore has very little social welfare and this has caused hardships for many of it’s citizens that have fallen through the gaps. One need only to look at recent examples such as Rebecca Loh (The story behind the Mum who killed her 9 year old son) to understand the severe shortcomings of social protection in Singapore.
Is Singapore really in such a fragile state that, as Shanmugam suggests, increasing social protection expenditure will pose great risk and challenge to Singapore’s future?
Mr Shanmugam who is also the Foreign Affairs Minister, insists that one of Singapore’s key advantages over other countries in the region is it’s “very good” government system, but does a very good system allow so many citizens to fall through the cracks while still insisting that social spending cannot increase?
Well, you voted for this government and there is nothing you can do about it.