Low returns, questions over destination of funds create trouble for PAP

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

We should expect reforms to be tempered by PAP resistance to any claims of social citizenship rights to demand that government ensure reasonable standards of economic and social welfare; and protect technocratic elites’ discretionary powers. Singapore’s model of state capitalism must not be diminished by policy changes towards what government leaders refer to as a “compassionate meritocracy.”

Singapore’s economic globalization has been accompanied by a deepening of state capitalism. Consequently, direct or indirect dependence on the state for access to economic and social resources – including housing, employment, business contracts and, indeed, personal savings – is widespread. Moreover, the proliferation of government-linked companies and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) sovereign wealth fund has enhanced the power and resources at the disposal of Singapore’s technocratic elites.

Significantly, the government makes no routine retirement fund contributions, yet the PAP state controls access to funds and how they are invested. In the 1980s the combined employer/employee contributions were around 44 percent. CPF holders thus expected economic security in retirement.

However, as Singapore’s highly globalised economy intensified, the income gap, as measured by the Gini coefficient, rose from 0.422 in 2000 to 0.478 in 2012 to make it the developed world’s second-most unequal economy. The government failed to contain markets’ uneven social and economic effects. PAP apprehension about social welfare and other forms of redistribution, though, is not rooted in a belief in liberal markets, but a preference for political paternalism.

Lee Kuan Yew contended that the PAP government....http://www.asiasentinel.com/econ-bus...nd-under-fire/


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