Singapore — The Big Day is still a couple of weeks away but on Thursday (Feb 3) Mr Lawrence Wong gave a sneak preview of the very first Budget he will roll out as Finance Minister on Feb 18.
He dropped a big clue: It will help people cope with the rising cost of living, and also provide support for sectors facing difficulties.
The minister offered this hint at a virtual event organised by the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre (SCCC) and Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations (SFCCA), The Straits Times reports.
Mr Wong noted that despite the current surge of Omicron infections, restrictions on socialising had not been tightened.
This is despite fresh cases topping the 5,000 mark for the first time on Oct 27 last year, and almost reaching 6,000 on Jan 25, when 5,996 new cases were reported. Compare this with the Dec 31 total of 344.
Mr Wong added: “With each wave, we have strengthened our defences and become more resilient. So I am confident that in this Year of the Tiger, we will be able to make further progress in our journey towards living with Covid-19.”
But will the aid that the Government plans on extending be enough for households grappling with substantially higher costs of living?
Last December saw the highest rate (4 per cent) of inflation, or how much more expensive goods and services have become, in almost nine years.
The overall inflation rate for 2021 was 3.8 per cent, nearly double the 2 per cent historical average. Simply out, this hurts people’s purchasing power.
It doesn’t help that in Singapore, where over 90 per cent of food is imported, has been hit harder than other countries because of several global factors, from supply chain disruptions because of pandemic restrictions in other countries, to bad weather events that affected agriculture in neighbouring Malaysia.
Higher oil and gas prices all over the world have also affected the prices of, well, nearly everything, including food, transportation, and utilities.
A recent BBC report quotes the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as saying that food prices around the world increased by 28 per cent in 2021, although according to a Feb 3 Channel News Asia report, food inflation in Singapore was said to be only 1.4 per cent last year.
But any type of inflation is felt more acutely in lower-income households.
Mr Paul Teng, an expert on food security from the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies at Nanyang Technological University was quoted in a Jan 28 South China Morning Post report as saying that an increase in food prices affects households that earn less since it means they’ll need to allocate more money toward their food budget from their other needs.
The same report quotes CIMB Private Banking’s Song Seng Wun, an economist, as saying that he expects this year’s budget to include vouchers and tax rebates to help mitigate the rise in food prices.
On the ground, organisations that address hunger have found themselves helping more people.
The charity Food from the Heart saw a 59 per cent increase of food packs delivered in 2021 in comparison with 2019.
Ms Nichol Ng, who co-founded Food Bank Singapore, told the BBC that the percentage of the population that has needed help has, in her estimation, “slowly crept to maybe 20% of the population including middle income families that might not even know where to get help in the first place.”
“What we have seen when we make the door-to-door deliveries is that young families [with] both husband and wife working a part-time job or in the gig economy – these were the families that got impacted when Covid hit and all the part-time work dried up,” she said.
/TISG
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