"Net wealth" here is defined by a person's financial and real estate assets minus debt.
On this score, the only countries that outrank it are Australia, Japan, Belgium, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom.
If Singapore had been a person, it would have stood above the unwashed tableau of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), watching from its penthouse and laughing into its cognac.
But it has spent the year being a little down in the mouth, preoccupied with property prices, taxi fares and faulty trains.
This gloom is hard to explain in the grander scheme of things.
Academics like SIM University's Dr Ho are quick to point out that "among the developed countries, we are at the very top" of the inequality stakes.
Citigroup economist Kit Wei Zheng makes a sobering point: "While the period of fast growth in 2004-2007 did see wages for the bottom 20 per cent recover most of their earlier losses, wages of the rich rose much faster."
This means that the bottom 20 per cent of working folk have spent much of the last decade standing still when the rest of Asia appears to be pelting ahead.
It is the condition of the middle class - this increasingly vocal and dissatisfied group - that is the most perplexing.
"A concrete example of this discontent can be seen in the recent general election in which the PAP garnered its lowest percentage of votes... since Independence," says Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir, an assistant professor of sociology at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
"The main issues... are a combination of the rising cost of living in Singapore and the lower standard of living... linked to the large increase of migration into the country over the last few years."
Ultimately, the math of the middle class is a messy one.
Last year, the average person in Singapore worked the most hours among developed countries, clocking 2,409 hours annually.
Norwegians worked just about half as hard: 1,414 hours.
Gallingly, Singaporeans were among the least productive, with the fourth-lowest gross domestic product per hour worked in purchasing power parity terms - while their restful Norwegian counterparts ranked first.
ORIGINAL SOURCE
Content used in this not-for-profit blog remain the property of their respective owners.
No comments:
Post a Comment