LKY was very fond of “hard truths.” This chart, courtesy of The Economist, illustrates a hard truth that the PAP don’t want you to know. This is that the purchasing power of Singapore wages measured on a per hour basis is extremely low not only compared to countries like Australia and the US but also to countries like the UK, which Shanmugam and his colleagues want you to believe is a basket case long surpassed by Singapore and to which falsehood many UK politicians knowingly or unknowingly subscribe, for domestic political reasons. It also compares very unfavourably with our Asian neighbours such as Hong Kong and Japan. Singapore is on the level of South Korea, a country which was completely devastated by the Korean War, unlike Singapore which inherited a lot of capital stock from the British colonial administration, and which enjoys none of Singapore’s strategic advantages.

By way of background, The Economist invented the Big Mac Index a few decades ago as a sort of rough and ready measure of purchasing power parity. Calculating the exchange rate which would equalise the price of a Big Mac between countries and comparing this with the actual exchange rate would measure how far a currency was under or over valued versus the US$.

The chart above corroborates what I have been saying on my blog for some time. Singaporean workers earn much less per hour than workers in other developed countries and are thus forced to work much longer hours to make ends meet. Among developed countries Singaporean working hours ate only surpassed by South Korea, though at least South Korea is a democracy and there’s much more awareness of inequality as shown in award winning films like Parasite. It would be impossible to make such a film in Singapore.

Not only do Singaporeans have to work intolerably long hours and take second and third jobs to make a living wage, they then have to pay much higher prices for essential foodstuffs than workers in many other developed countries. I did a brief comparison of prices at NTUC Fairprice compared to Tesco in the UK and showed that prices for items like chicken, bread and rice are far higher here. This is borne out by the Big Mac comparison above. If I’m elected to Parliament I will press for the CCS to investigate collusion and price gouging by supermarkets in Singapore. NTUC’s links to the PAP are a red flag.

Way back as far as 2011 UBS published its Survey of Prices and Wages in Global Cities which showed that Singaporean workers’ wages lagged behind those in Hong Kong and even Taipei and trailed in the dust behind London, New York and Sydney. The survey showed that Singapore wages were on a par with those in KL and Moscow. The PAP’s response was to force UBS to exclude Singapore from the survey in future.

When will Singaporeans understand that the PAP’s interests run counter to making them better off? All the PAP’s policies are geared to growing the reserves about which it refuses to be transparent or to tell us who the ultimate beneficiaries will be given the abysmally low growth rate. The PAP refuses to implement a minimum wage and adopts employer friendly labour and immigration policies designed to suppress wages. Setting the bar so low for Employment Passes, on which there are no limits, is a prime example of how the PAP deliberately creates unfair competition for Singaporeans. Lawrence Wong trumpets the wage subsidies for low income and elderly workers but these serve mainly to benefit employers rather than workers. Giving out handouts in the form of SG60 and CDC vouchers is no substitute for a failure to put the interests of our workers first. Singaporeans have to decide at the upcoming election whether they prefer vouchers to transparency, increased support for Singaporeans and living wages or whether they prefer to be gaslit with “alternative” facts and disinformation from the PAP

Published by kjeyaretnam

I'm a Singaporean economist who became an opposition activist. I blog to provide an alternative to the porkies that the Pinkies tell. It just so happens that my alternative is the truth. That's why I've never been sued in any civil or criminal court no matter how hard hitting my criticism. I'm quoted and interviewed and asked to speak across the world but largely censored in Singapore in an effort to silence my political opinions. The left hate me because they think I split their vote and because I eschew their outmoded economic models. Models that don't work. The Right and the Conservatives hate me because I'm a liberal. I'm not sure what the middle think of me. I don't think there are more than a handful of people in the middle, here in Singapore. I'm a Singaporean born and bred, dual heritage, my parents Singaporean established here before the State of Singapore was created. I'm not Eurasian. I read economics at Cambridge and could be broadly described as from the Keynesian school but I believe in interventions. I was formerly a successful hedge fund manager. After economics and politics my greatest interests are history, film and Makan. I run but I run so I can eat like a Singaporean. View all posts by kjeyaretnam