Debated in Parliament on 5 Feb 2013.
Ms Tan Su Shan asked the Acting Minister for Social and Family Development (a) how social mobility in Singapore is defined, measured and monitored; and (b) how has Singapore fared on these measures from 2003-2012 and in the preceding decade.
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Mdm Speaker, social mobility is an important objective for our society to ensure that people from different backgrounds have the opportunity to improve their lives over time.
In absolute terms, we seek to track improvements made by individuals over time. Typical indicators may include educational attainment and income.
In education, the percentages of Singaporeans who did not complete Secondary education 20 and 10 years ago were 10% and 4% respectively. Today, it is less than 1%. The percentages who went on to post-Secondary education 20 and 10 years ago were 60% and 86% respectively. Today, it is 94%.
For full-time employed residents, growth in the median gross monthly income from work, including employer CPF contributions, over 2002-2012 and the period 1996-2002 was 1.3% per annum and 2.7% per annum respectively. The equivalent figures at the 20th percentile from 2002-2012 and the period 1996-2002 were 0.1% per annum and 2.2% per annum respectively. These figures are in real terms, having adjusted for inflation. They do not take into account Government transfers, such as Workfare Income Supplements, that Singaporeans may have received during these periods.
This reflects the churn amongst income groups in our society. We do not have data on such churn as it requires longitudinal studies over a long period of time.
To create opportunities for Singaporeans to build better lives for themselves and their families, we must continue to create good jobs, invest in education for our young and skills upgrading for our workers, and also create opportunities for our people to fulfil their potential in other ways beyond educational and income attainment. We are also committed to provide additional support for those who need help and develop more upstream measures to help the low-income families and their children improve their lives.
I thank the Acting Minister. Madam, the numbers for Singapore are very good and also very bad. We have an average GDP per capita of over US$60,000, which is excellent, but a median income per adult of only about US$30,000, which is very low. Hence, with the
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highest Gini coefficient around in the world, my question to the Acting Minister is: does he look at inter-generational income elasticity?
The Straits Times had an article that said that Singapore's inter-generational income elasticity is 0.58, which means that we are less socially mobile than Hong Kong, at 0.4, or the Scandinavian countries, at 0.3. Hence, are there any proactive measures taken by the Ministry to try and stop this vicious poverty trap to lift the bottom 20% of Singaporeans out of this vicious cycle?
Mdm Speaker, I would like to thank Ms Tan for her supplementary questions. Indeed, we have gone through quite a few of the studies to try to track inter-generational shifts. Because of the varying assumptions made by the different studies, we have not found any of them to be particularly complete, in the way that they have done so.
What the Member has mentioned is correct, that, indeed, we are most focused on the bottom 20th percentile, to make sure that even if they are not as well off in this generation, their children will be able to get out of the situation that they are in. And, indeed, this is the focus of my Ministry's work to make sure that we do not just look at the families in risk but also to look at the families at risk, so that before they get into trouble, they have the best opportunities available to get out of the situation that they are in.
To this end, we are focusing a lot of our efforts on childcare and education to make sure that the next generation has the best head-start possible and to be roughly at the same starting point before they go onwards with the rest of their lives and go into the workforce.
There are also some studies that have shown and have tried to track to see whether the top 10 percentile of our income earners – how do they correspond with, say, their fathers' generation. From the limited data that we have, we are roughly in the same situation as the US and the UK, but we are not totally satisfied with the data yet because they took a cohort from some years back. What we want to do is to be able to consistently track cohorts going forward, and that will require us to conduct some longitudinal studies which will take some time.
We are, indeed, very concerned with this issue and we share your concerns that we should do more to help those people at the lower socio-economic strata. I hope that this House and the members of the public will agree with us that, actually, going forward, our help needs to be much more targeted.
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We need to give more help to those people at the bottom and, perhaps, not so much to those people at the top end. So, it will not be a case whereby everything is universal, but we really should focus more help to those people at the bottom. And if we look at some of the policies that we have rolled out in recent months – indeed, that is what we are doing, to focus more help on those people at the bottom 20th percentile to bottom one-third of our population.
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