THROUGH FACT AND FICTION: THIS IS WHAT INEQUALITY LOOKED LIKE IN SINGAPORE (1965-1985)

Abstract

There was much doubt surrounding Singapore’s survival in 1965. Singapore’s future was seemingly bleak, having separated from Malaysia with no natural resources to speak of. However, in five decades, Singapore has engineered a phenomenal transformation of its economy. From a primarily regional trading port in the 1960s to a manufacturing hub in the 1970s, Singapore has blossomed into an international business and financial hub in the present. With a gross national income of US $64,567 per capita in 2018, the World Bank declared Singapore as one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Yet the cost of Singapore’s impressive economic achievements and accompanying accolades seem to be the emergence of worsening socio-economic inequalities in society. The topic of inequality was recently propelled to the forefront of national discourse through Teo Yeo Yenn’s This is What Inequality Looks Like, published in 2018. However, even with this recent surge in attention towards income inequality, the historical processes that led to the current socio-economic gap between the affluent and lower-class Singaporeans have not received adequate attention. A look at the state of inequality between 1965-1985, which was Singapore’s earliest period of sustained prosperity, shows that while the state of inequality in recent years seem to be bleak, it was certainly not as miserable compared to Singapore’s first 20 years of independence. In fact, the Gini-coefficient in 2018 was lower than it was during the 1970s-80s. Ironically, the 1970s-80s was also Singapore’s most prosperous period of growth. Yet inequality during this period barely surfaced in public and academic discourse on inequality. In this thesis, in addition to materials like economic data and surveys, which are conventionally used to narrate economic pasts, I will also be looking at local English literary works, local English newspapers, and the annual parliamentary debates. In combination, these sources will expose the increasing socio-economic inequalities from 1965-1985. This mixture of sources will help provide an in-depth and vibrant depiction of the reality of inequality, thereby making this a partial step towards building a revised picture of inequality in Singapore’s politically independent past. Instead of being mistaken as a recent phenomenon, inequality was, in reality, already a part of the Republic of Singapore’s first two decades.