Highlights

As Singapore prepares to commemorate 60 years of NS in 2027, Defence Minister Chan Chun Sing recently announced that MINDEF is looking at how recognition initiatives such as the NS HOME awards can be made more impactful and more meaningful. MINDEF is also exploring a recognition package for past and present national servicemen. These measures […]

In Singapore, we choose ministers on the basis of their high competence – and then pray they also become good politicians. In other countries, they choose ministers on the basis of their political skills – and then pray, usually in vain, that they turn out to be competent ministers. So socialised are we to the […]

SINGAPORE: Economists measure the true cost of a decision not by the price attached to it, but by the next best alternative given up to make it. That idea, opportunity cost, is the term Prime Minister Lawrence Wong and Coordinating Minister for Public Services Chan Chun Sing both reached for in Parliament on Tuesday (Sep […]

Singapore’s support system for young families incentivises the nuclear household. This undervalues critical multigenerational care. “It takes a village to raise a child”, we’re told. But when you look at how our housing, childcare, and household benefits are structured, the village Singapore imagines is one where everyone unhelpfully lives in separate flats. Measures such as […]

SINGAPORE: The latest General Household Survey (GHS) offers a nuanced picture of marriage and family life in Singapore. At first glance, the statistics appear contradictory. More young adults remain single well into their thirties than five years ago, while completed fertility among married women continues to decline. Yet by their 40s, the overwhelming majority of […]

SINGAPORE: There can hardly be a worse time to ask whether someone is “really Singaporean”. As families waited desperately for news of nine Singaporeans reported missing after the Nepal floods, some people online scrutinised their names and photographs and asked exactly that. Others questioned why Singapore should help them at all. Some said things far […]

Singapore is good at delivering services to communities. It is far less practised at letting communities organise for themselves — and it has never built the institution for that purpose. A child is falling behind in school. If the family can afford it, they pay for private tuition. If they cannot, a self-help group or a social service […]

SINGAPORE: What should strike Singaporeans about the National Day Rally (NDR) is that the government is changing the logic of family support. The almost S$70,000 (US$55,140) in support for every Singaporean child is simply the most visible expression of the biggest overhaul of family policy in a generation. On Sunday night (Aug 23), Prime Minister […]

SINGAPORE: For the first time, married couples living with children make up less than half of Singapore’s households. The finding, from the latest General Household Survey released on Jun 30, sits alongside two others: More young residents are staying single and families are getting smaller. These shifts, usually discussed through the lenses of marriage, fertility and ageing, can […]

Singaporean Chinese or Chinese Singaporean? Recent events have yanked the distinction back into public consciousness. Today, that question is no longer idle. A rising China with its expanding soft power, Singapore’s falling birth rates, and the naturalisation of immigrants that the Republic relies on to sustain its numbers have together unsettled what separates a Chinese […]