Introduction

Singapore's developmental path over the past 40 years has led it from a third-world port station to a first-world industrial city exhibiting social indicators and standards of living on a par with the industrialised west. The People's Action Party (PAP), which has governed Singapore during all this time through a mixture of Westminster democracy and social repression, chose a developmental ideology that was authoritarian and free market, verging on the socialist in the nature of some of its social provision, yet avowedly capitalist; and exhibiting the characteristics of a major first-world city while retaining aspects of its Asian patrimony.

The public welfare system is characterised by the double objective of developing resource infrastructure (which includes human resources: the Labour Ministry's name was recently changed to Ministry of Manpower) and providing a welfare safety net for the most disadvantaged (Goh, 2001, 2002). Private welfare provision exists alongside subsidised state programmes. There is universal free education up to pre-university, including various routine measures such as an annual cash payment to school children and one-off measures such as partly meeting the cost of personal computers for teachers, a subsidised health system including a means-tested grant for those who cannot pay, and subsidised public housing with programmes of reduced rent for the less well off and one-off rent rebates from time to time. The state provides a small amount of (stringently means-tested) income relief and other welfare services and acts also as enabler, facilitator and regulator of voluntary welfare providers through development operating grants to welfare organisations, assisting with fundraising and coordinating affairs through the National Council of Social Service and its fundraising arm, the Community Chest. This is called the ‘many helping hands’ approach (Ministry of Community Development, 1996; Government of Singapore, 1991). In addition, in the past 10 years or so, the Ministry of Community Development has developed a network of state-funded neighbourhood welfare offices, a programme that intensified following the financial crisis of 1997. Indeed, the state has considerably enhanced its role during the economic slowdown following the crisis (Lim, 2000; Goh, 2001, 2002; Yap, forthcoming). At the apex of the public welfare system lies the Central Provident Fund (CPF), whereby a proportion of a person's wages is added to a portion paid by the employer and the sum retained until retirement.