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4 May 2012, 9.25PM

3 comments & replies |by Guest | Singapore Population and Demography

Singapore’s Ambassador-at-large Professor Tommy Koh has spoken out against Singapore’s widening income gap between the rich and the poor, describing it as ‘socially unconscionable’.

Speaking on Thursday at an Institute of Policy Study (IPS) roundtable on Singapore’s population trends, Koh, who is also special adviser to the IPS, expressed his concerns at Singapore’s income disparity which is the highest among the thirty most developed economies in the world after Hong Kong.

Referring to economist professor Lim Chong Yah’s wage shock therepy, he said he agreed with Prof Lim’s aim though he did not agree with his proposal.

“The issue needed to be addressed not through palliatives but by seeing what we can do to fundamentally alter the wages of the bottom 30 per cent of our people,” he added.

Prof Koh also rebuked economist fellow participant at the roundtable Shandre Thangavelu who argued that the income gap is “part of globalisation and technological change”.

“Singapore’s practice of importing large numbers of cheap and unskilled labour depresses wages in its service and non-tradable sectors,” Prof Koh said.

He further noted that construction workers in Hong Kong are twice as productive as those in Singapore, and receive two-and-a-half times the income earned here.

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Guest

9 May 2012, 4.27PM

All of us knew that the fact that import of cheap and unskilled labour depressed wages long ago.

It is only the PAP that either does not know (because the ministers make millions and sit in ivory towers), or they do know but choose to ignore it.

Guest

4 May 2012, 10.27PM

Prof Tommy Koh is really too slow, only until the population buay tahan with foreign trash bullying and discriminating Singaporeans and started to blast those fake foreign talents then Prof Tommy Koh comes in.

He is still part of the establishment.

Credit should go to to those who started the ball rolling about Fake Foreign Talents and Foreign Trash bullying Singaporeans.

They are our heroes, without them NTUC cannot even get employers to sit up. Come to think of it, NTUC should employed these heroes instead of "jia liao bi" people who cannot help workers for so many years.

This is the truth, don't deny the truth.

Guest

7 May 2012, 2.48PM

The lower wage earners are actually the ones who work the economy, the REAL economy. The high wage workers like CEOs and those in ivory tower positions do nothing much but think and talk. They socialise more often than not to climb the social ladder quickly. Think about productivity, how have the high wage earners been productive? What are their benchmarks to measure their productivity? How well they can hold their liquor?

Increase 10% for a high wage earner is already more than a year's pay for the low wage workers, who worked the REAL economy. Ask the CEOs, the ministers and the MPs how have they improved their productivity to warrant their obsene pay, bonuses and increments that only serve to widen the income disparity and social divide.

It is strange that the problem of income disparity is directed at the low wage worker's productivity and not that of the high wage earner's instead.

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