Highlights

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’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 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: 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 […]

Governments and organisations have long relied on surveys and focus groups to gather and understand public sentiment. Now, artificial intelligence may be changing that – for good and bad. Last year, researchers from Stanford University simulated the personalities of more than 1,000 individuals based on in-depth interviews, and found that these AI profiles could simulate […]

SINGAPORE: Before the consensus conference on local-foreign integration even started, a participant sent us an email. He wanted the Institute of Policy Studies’ research team to know what to expect: He wrote that he intended to be vocal. That he was angry and frustrated. That he wanted to voice his concerns about citizens being neglected, about job […]

Held on 9 March 2026, the first lecture of the 18th IPS-Nathan Lecture Series, titled “Singapore, Biodiversity and a Thriving City”, was delivered by Dr Shawn Lum, Senior Lecturer at the Asian School of the Environment, Nanyang Technological University. The lecture explored Singapore’s environmental transformation, the science of biodiversity conservation, and the social attitudes that […]

Commentators wringing their hands over the state of international affairs these days are fond of quoting (and mangling) the Italian intellectual and philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s famous quotation from a different era: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety […]