SINGAPORE: An infographic published on Seasia Stats on Monday (Sept 2) showed Singapore ranks dead last when it comes to the poverty rate among Southeast Asian countries.
Myanmar topped the list with a 49.7 per cent poverty rate, while Singapore was in the last place, with 0 per cent. This means that almost half of Myanmar’s population subsists on less than US$2.15 (S$2.81) per day.
This was based on data from 2022 to 2024 from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Indonesia’s Ministry of Finance, the Philippine Statistics Authority, the Singapore Department of Statistics, the Asian Development Bank, and Statista 2024.
“No recent data for Laos between 2022 to 2024. Last we saw was from 2018 at 18.3 per cent. And for Brunei, no poverty data could be found in various official sources or other references,” Seasia Stats noted.
There is no single official definition of poverty for all countries taken together, and even within large nations, such as the United States, poverty guidelines differ from state to state.
When the Seasia Stats infographic was shared on Reddit Singapore, some commenters noted that based on the threshold for extreme poverty set at less than S$2.81 per day, it’s “technically correct” that Singapore has 0 per cent poverty.
Others added that with only this amount, no one would be able to survive in Singapore anyway.
Another appeared to hold Seasia Stats at fault for including Singapore, which has no official poverty line, in the rankings. They added that it should have been kept off the list, like Brunei and Laos.
Read related: 105,000 households get little food but Chan doesn’t want to set poverty line
“Can’t have poverty if there’s no poverty line,” chimed in a Reddit user.
“The government just handing out one round of GST vouchers easily puts any Singaporean citizen above that poverty line. Not to mention ComCare and other welfare schemes for the low-income,” wrote another.
While Singapore has no official poverty line, some have argued for its necessity. Workers’ Party MP Jamus Lim (Sengkang GRC) said in Parliament last year that he found this “puzzling and exasperating.”
“How can we say we’re successful in targeting poverty or not if we don’t have the most basic of indicators for evaluating it?” he wrote in a Facebook post in May of last year. /TISG
Read also: Jamus Lim Advocates for Singapore’s Official Poverty Line: ‘I Find It Crazy We Don’t Have One