Tan Jee Say: Increase in foreign labour accounted for 80% of GDP growth

Pro-Singaporean presidential candidate Tan Jee Say has hit out at the PAP’s economic strategy during a lunchtime talk on Thursday on “Survival and Opportunities in an Uncertain World”.

A trained economist who graduated from the prestigious Oxford University, Mr Tan said he is not enamoured of the current economic strategy and described it as having an ‘opportunistic undertone.’

“It assumes that it is the only viable economic strategy given Singapore’s circumstances and that there is no better strategy. All it needs to do to respond to changes in external demand for Singapore’s goods and services, is essentially to regulate the supply of labour,” he added.

He revealed that the increase in foreign labour accounted for 80% of GDP growth which was an easy and lazy option.

Singapore’s GDP growth in the last decade has been fueled largely by the easy availability of cheap foreign labor which keeps wages low thereby inflating GDP figures artificially.

High GDP growth benefits PAP ministers more than ordinary Singapore workers as their obscene salaries are pegged directly to it. Foreigners also provide a ready pool of new citizen voters to keep the PAP in power as the unfortunate example of Potong Pasir has shown.

Despite the high GDP growth, the wages and domestic purchasing power of Singaporeans have remained stagnant as the income gap between the rich and poor continues to widen. Singaporeans now have less disposable income than the Malaysians, according to a UBS report last year.

Mr Tan Jee Say promised to address the fundamental cause of the deep social division in Singapore which is the underlying economic strategy of the Government if he is elected President.

TRE

Tan Jee Say Transcript, 11 August 2011