Income Inequality In Singapore Essay

Much of the attention directed to inequality in Singapore today has been focused to income inequality. It has formed many of the debates in the country, as well as the world forum. People are getting richer while others are getting poorer day in day out. The attention has shifted from other forms of inequality to squarely focus on income disparity or income inequality. For the past one decade, the level of disparity in income in Singapore has risen significantly. Whether measuring it using Gini coefficient or by use of the income ratio between the bottom and top declines, it is clearly an irrefutable evidence that Singapore has become an unequal state in terms of income for the past ten years. Pickett and Wilkinson postulated that the rise

The rapid advancement in technology has increased substitution of labor with mechanization and information technologies, thereby depressing income of semi-skilled and the unskilled workers in the country, thus increasing income inequality in the country. The adaptation of telecommunication and information technologies has come up with a lot of production benefits, but it has brought marginalizing of laborers who are shy away of taking advantage of the increasing technologies. There is an exacerbated gap between unskilled and skilled laborers in Singapore, indicating that the level of education of older people is low while many women have limited experience on the adopted new technologies. These and many others have made the people of Singapore fail to embrace technology, thereby limiting their chances of mobility. Technological change has also led to polarization of many job opportunities, for instance, there is a high demand of job vacancies requiring high skills and with good salaries, but low demand for jobs with low skills. In the long run, this increases income inequality. Manning and Goos (2003) and Murnane and Levy (2003) have argued that the increase in the demand for lovely and lousy jobs is well explained by