Andrew Loh/ “The problem that the HDB face is they are just short of rental flats. In the whole of Singapore today, we have about 45,000 rental flats. But that’s not enough. “It’s quite clear in my mind, we need to ramp up the building of rental flats as quickly as we can. Not just by a few thousand, actually …

Deborah Choo/ A typical day started at 5am. Hannah (not her real name) would do some household chores and feed the family’s many pets. Mid-mornings saw her shuttling between her employer’s fruit stall and his daughter-in-law’s photo shop in Clementi. In the afternoon, there would be more chores at the daughter-in-law’s house. In the evening, she had to clean and …

Gordon Lee/ In Part 2, we study costs of production, inflation, productivity and competitiveness. Costs of production A minimum wage policy will lead to increased costs for firms – but the degree to which costs increase is diluted by non-wage costs and higher wage earners. Take a hypothetical firm, where 60% of total costs are labour costs. Even though 50% …