Sunday, October 05, 2008

Singapore's Growth

Singapore seems to be going round and round in a vicious circle of chasing growth and workers to service the growth. Last year the population growth was more than 5% which heavily heavily clogged the facilities, requiring even more expansion of the infrastructure and therefore more workers to build them.

When I posed the question, the answer is always there isn't enough workers and Singaporeans are not willing to do some of the jobs. Perhaps this is only partly true. It may be true of jobs requiring special skills but if Australians are willing to do labouring jobs at high pay, surely some Singaporeans will too. Neither would want to work for the money that the Bangladeshi workers get. So is the policy merely to get things done cheaply? Is Singapore boasting of high average income only because those hundreds of thousands earning low income are not counted ?

The next question is, how much growth does Singapore really need ?

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