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Immigration is the Elephant in the Room

Dec 17

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Raging Elephant

Elephant in the Room

Yesterday the ST gave us a centre-page spread by two vice-presidents of the Economics Society discussing the rise in inequality in Singapore. The fact that one of them is the Chief Economist at GIC and the other is Director of Planning at Resorts World Sentosa might be a clue that we are not going to hear much that is radical from them. You might want to question what insight they will be able to give you into why your ricebowl doesn’t look like your neighbour’s rice bowl. After all someone from GIC is effectively a civil servant, while Resorts World Sentosa presumably wouldn’t like attention called to the fact that the euphemistically named ‘Integrated’ Resorts probably contribute in a small way to rising inequality.

The writers state that the government’s attempt to minimise the cost of social welfare by focusing only on those in the direst need has exacerbated inequality and led to a more divisive society. I use the word “focusing” somewhat  ironically as many Singaporeans would say that the aim of government welfare policy is to ensure the eligibility criteria are so tough that everyone is excluded.  In fact this is the crux of the PAP theory of your ricebowl  that I like to examine in these pages. However, while the authors argue that an inclusive society is better from everyone’s viewpoint and that this is best achieved by universal social programmes, they make the mistake of assuming that the government is actually interested in inclusivity and fostering social cohesion. There are many who hold by outmoded theories of Darwinian competition (though strangely this belief vanishes when it comes to politics or areas of the economy that the government dominates). MM Lee’s famous words, about Singaporeans needing a spur in their side from new immigrants if they are not to become lazy and complacent, spring to mind.

This brings me on to the most surprising – or perhaps not so surprising if you consider the government connections – aspect of their article.  They discuss the near stagnation in real median incomes of those in full time employment and absolute stagnation for those in the bottom 20th percentile, even on the government’s own highly selective and possibly biased figures.  The use of the base year of 2001 probably flatters what little growth there has been, as incomes declined from a high in 1998 and reached a low in 2001 after the Asian crisis and the end of the dot-com boom. The government’s figures also do not allow for changes in hours worked, which probably rose over this period. For a fuller discussion, please see my article, The Stagnant Society (http://sonofadud.com/2011/10/13/singapore-the-stagnant-society/) for a longer discussion.

However they fail to mention the elephant in the room, which is immigration policy or the lack thereof. Undoubtedly the government’s determination to allow our wages to be determined by those in the poorest economies in Asia has played a major part in depressing real wages, particularly for the lower-skilled workers. Not only was there very little restriction on foreign labour, and no restriction at all for those earning more than $2,500 a month, but there appears to have been lax enforcement of what rules there were and ample loopholes. This has been demonstrated by a recent case where an employer was jailed for putting phantom Singaporean workers on his payroll to allow him to bring in more foreign Work Permit holders.

In his book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/29/ha-joon-chang-23-things), the Cambridge development economist, Ha-Joon Chang, uses a comparison between the wages of a bus driver in Sweden and one in India. The Swedish bus driver earns around fifty times as much as the Indian bus driver yet it would be hard to say that he was fifty times as productive or skilful. In fact the Indian bus driver probably has the more stressful job or requires more skill, given the state of Indian roads and the density of traffic. The differential between the Swedish bus driver’s wage and the Indian’s is almost wholly attributable to immigration controls. Of course Swedish wages are high to start with because of their much higher productivity in the traded goods sector which is subject to competition. Employers in the non-tradeables sector then have to pay higher wages to compete for scarce labour. Without being able to bring in foreign labour they have little choice.

What we have in Singapore is  a situation where the wages of those who can be replaced by cheap foreign labour have been held back or in many cases cut.  Even those with higher-level skills have undoubtedly been held back by competition from third-world graduates from India, China and the Philippines, even Eastern Europe.  Worryingly there are clear indications that advances in software and machine intelligence are starting to make redundant even highly-paid white-collar jobs in areas such as law and financial services that were hitherto relatively protected from foreign competition. But this government’s open door policy to foreign labour has been the main cause of rising inequality in Singapore.

Whether we have a minimum wage, or a cap on foreign labour (which amounts to the same thing), this is the Elephant in Room whose emissions are causing the inequality. Unfortunately, we risk the Elephant turning into a Raging Bull if the xenophobic ranting in cyberspace is anything to go by. What we need now, and urgently, is some serious and open and reasoned debate on the future of Singapore.

Posted in Society, The market

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Dear Santa, I don’t like the cadre and secret cabal I got last year. Next year I’d like some openness, competition and democracy instead.

Dec 12

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Recently the PAP held their first Party convention post election allowing us to scrutinise the cadre system and the iron grip on power that it provides for.  AlexAuwrote about it in his blog (http://yawningbread.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/four-barriers-to-remaking-the-pap/) where he highlighted his opinion that the cadre system is one of four main reasons why the PAP would fail to learn any lessons from their setback in GE 2011. The rest of his reasons would be worthy of discussion in a separate article in their own right.  However as we look back at 2011 I will concern myself with a closer look at the cadre system and how it affects your ricebowl.

It is of course not only the PAP who employs the cadre system. For the benefit of those who may be unfamiliar with the term, a cadre system is one in which the leadership of the Party selects certain members to be cadres. The cadres are then the only members who have voting rights   and they elect the leadership. It is of course a completely closed system in which the leadership ensures its position by only selecting as cadres people who will be loyal to them. The cadre vote the leaders who select the cadre who vote the leaders who select ………………..and so on.

In her 1971 political science thesis, “Singapore’s People’s Action Party: Its History, Organisation and Leadership (Oxford University Press)”, Ms Pang Cheng Lian, who sits on the board of Temasek Cares, describes elections to the CEC by the cadres as a “closed system”, in which “the cardinals appoint the pope and the pope appoints the cardinals”.  Most of us Singaporeans know this system is employed by the men in white.  Sadly, as far as I am aware, every other political party in Singapore employs a variant of the cadre system. This includes the Workers Party, the SDP, the NSP and the SPP.  I have no information about the other new parties, the Justice Party the USD (does anyone remember them? ) and the new parties still to come  in 2012 but I believe it is safe to assume they all employ or will employ the same system.

Just as Alex believes the cadre system may explain why the PAP is incapable of learning new lessons so I believe that adherence to the cadre system may be partly responsible for the agonisingly slow progress of the Opposition parties and the dearth of new ideas or renewal.  It is certainly the culprit behind the endemic Party hopping which discredits all Opposition equally and has nothing to do with renewal of ideas. Party hopping is the same old faces, with the same old ideas but with new titles.   It would take a visionary to develop a party with a radically different structure. Or maybe a democracy veteran with no time left to lose who, looking back on his life’s work, realised that closed organisations can’t give birth to Open Societies. Yes, The Reform Party is the only political party in Singapore which is a democracy since it alone does not have a cadre system to protect the leadership and all members have voting rights.

The cadre system has its origins in the Marxist concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the “vanguard”. This meant that only a small elite group of individuals were fit to lead the Communist Party and the nation. The masses were not ready for democracy and it was better that they be led by those who knew best. The Communist ideal was one of eventual full democracy once the masses had been educated enough. Leninargued (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism) the ideal vanguard party would be one where membership was completely open and its workings transparent, the “entire political arena is as open to the public view as is a theatre stage to the audience” (from What is to be Done?).  He seems to be acknowledging the benefits of competition though cannot speak its name when he goes on to say that a party that supposedly implemented democracy to such an extent that “the general control (in the literal sense of the term) exercised over every act of a party man in the political field brings into existence an automatically operating mechanism which produces what in biology is called the “survival of the fittest”.” This party would be completely open to the public eye as it conducted its business which would mainly consist of educating the proletariat to remove the false consciousness that had been instilled in them.

The cadre system went on to be adopted by both the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party and by many other Maoist revolutionary parties throughout the world.  Lenin originally intended it to deal with the problems of controlling and maintaining the secrecy of the Bolshevik party which was seeking to overthrow the Czarist regime in Russia, in the face of infiltration by the Okhrana, the Czar’s secret police.  Ironically the goal of preventing infiltration, this time by Communist agents, is the oft-cited justification given by the PAP leadership as to why the cadre system was introduced. If so it does not justify its retention today when there is no longer a Communist threat. Even if there were the ideal way of combating it would surely be through more democracy not less.

Of course the Communist roots of the PAP are not a secret.  This is why the arbitrary arrest and detention of certain individuals on the grounds that they were Marxists and that they represented a secretive organisation is particularly ironic.

The fact that the PAP continue to maintain a cadre system shows how out-of-step they are with modern democratic parties and how little understanding they have of the benefits of competition and transparency and accountability. While they maintain a closed system which ensures that only people, who hold the leadership’s views, whether out of principle or self-interest, get to vote, it is difficult to see how any renewal can take place. Perhaps it is too much to expect the ordinary people of Singapore to understand the need for multi-million dollar salaries for ministers. They are afflicted with the false consciousness of a belief in democratic values and the equality of individuals. You need elite (the cadres) who are sufficiently intelligent not to fall prey to false consciousness to understand why servant leaders need millions of dollars as remuneration.  Hopefully the review board will be able to explain it to us shortly.

However the other parties inSingaporeclearly feel the same way as the PAP that democracy is a dangerous idea and power should not be entrusted to the ordinary members.  Or they merely aspire to be the PAP and adhere slavishly to their ideas and methods-PAP LITE, if you will.  Whatever the motivation, all of them maintain some sort of cadre system. The argument often given for the necessity of this is that it leads to “stability”. This is just another facet of the argument that democracy leads to gridlock and that the people are too short-sighted or stupid to exercise power responsibly. Even if a so-called extreme faction managed to be elected to the leadership, like the AWARE situation, ultimately democracy ensures competition. If the new leadership fails to reflect the will of its members or is unsuccessful at winning electoral office then it can be replaced.

It is genuinely worrying that so much of the Opposition shares the same mindset as the PAP. This begs the question as to whether their leadership are genuinely interested in change or representation or whether it is merely power that they seek.

To recap on what I said earlier, the only party that does not have a cadre system is the Reform Party.  The RP is thus the only genuinely democratic party. Instead of a closed system, the RP CEC is elected by the Party Conference which is made up of delegates.  Everyone, provided they fulfil basic criterion, gets a vote.  As a result the Party is the purest expression of the will of its members. The Party Conference promotes a free market in ideas as any member can put forward a motion. As it forces anyone running for office to be responsive to the views of the members, it represents the implementation at the Party level of the principles we are fighting for at the national level.  We refer to this as Conference being Sovereign. It is clear that when JBJ set up the RP he wanted to have nothing to do with secretive cabals and backroom deals and start a party that would exemplify the virtues of democracy. He learnt from bitter experience, when he was ousted as SG of the WP, how dangerous an unrepresentative clique is.  In a way a genuinely democratic party was his legacy to the nation and serves as a model of what we need to see at the national level.

Many are scared away from joining the RP because of the lack of a cadre system which they feel makes it inherently unstable.  Certainly its first three years have not been an easy ride.  But if democracy itself is something we seek and value then a truly democratic Party is a necessity.  As the RP is not a good long term bet for ironclad  power, it is less attractive as an option to those who are power hungry or egotists.  Why go to all that trouble to infiltrate a party to make it less radical, less viable as an agent of change, when you may be voted out in 2 years time and the Party may simply revert to its former state?  This is what we saw happen with Aware.  A group of women cleverly saw that getting like minded members in the organisation in sufficient numbers was key to changing its identity.  But ultimately Aware was strong enough and its original ideology and had been in existence long enough to shake off that challenge.

No doubt many initially joined RP in error not clearly realising the ramifications of the democratic nature of the constitution.   What a shock it must have been to them to realise that Conference is Sovereign and yes, they would actually need to get a majority vote from ordinary members to change the constitution and bring in a cadre system.  How much easier it was to simply do a deal for power and leadership elsewhere  in exchange for sabotage.  And how much more effective to do it in collaboration with the State media, ever hungry as they are for dirt.

But here is the surprising thing. RP as an organisation , as Aware did before them, similarly survived with its democratic nature intact and went on to field 11 candidates in GE 2011.  So maybe democracy is not the greatest weakness of a   political party but its greatest strength in the long term.  Certainly many commentators like Alex are now seeing the cadre system as responsible for hampering progress within the PAP and its greatest obstacle going forward.

What next in 2012?  Well the PAP cadres have concluded their convention and business goes on as usual within their closed circles.  There has been a lot of talk of Opposition parties joining forces in a grand coalition as well as of new parties being set up. However the important question for voters should be whether any of the parties are genuinely democratic. I would not wish the RP to merge with another party for example, unless that party were also to adopt a democratic constitution and abandon the cadre system.   My fervent wish for 2012 is that any new party set up will be Democratic and that through openness and with competition fostering progress we will go forwards as a Nation and not backwards. We need to change the old Singapore/PAP influenced Model so that we can have a better future.  As always I am daring to imagine a new rice bowl for an advanced Asian nation.

Posted in Democracy

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Comfort and City Cab. Two more pies with fingers in them.

The nature of our small metropolis, the costs of private vehicle ownership and other factors such as convenience for elderly and physically challenged users, means that Taxis must be viewed as part of our public transport network.  It is therefore not surprising that most of us have been unhappy at the recent fare hikes and increases in surcharges announced by the largest taxi operator, Comfort and CityCab, which is owned by ComfortDelGro Corporation.    The National Taxi Association (NTA)’s call for the other taxi companies to swiftly follow suit has furthermore appeared, to many, to smack of price-fixing.  There have even been calls for the Competition Commission of Singapore to take action for anti-competitive behaviour.

However this is naive given the industry’s structure. Furthermore it plays into the government’s deliberate lack of transparency when it comes to admitting to the degree of ownership and control it exercises over the Singapore economy.  The problem is the dominance and nature of the government linked entities. This is the elephant in the room and would be activists should complain about this rather than cry “price fixing”,  before they pen letters to the Competition Commission.

Firstly, Comfort and CityCab between them have over 60% of the market for taxis. SMRT, a Temasek-controlled entity, has another 10-15% of the market. While ComfortDelgro is publicly listed with no single majority shareholder, the largest shareholder is the Singapore Labour Foundation, which is the investment arm of NTUC.  Its board and management are a splendid example of the Japanese practice of “amakudai” or “descent from heaven”.  Most of the board are ex-civil servants, former government scholars, or present or ex-MPs who have graduated here after careers with Temasek or one of its stable of companies.  To quote Wikipedia, “The practice is increasingly viewed as corrupt and a drag on unfastening the ties between private sector and state which prevent economic and political reforms.”

With that combined level of market share the taxi market can be viewed as highly concentrated. Economists would call this monopolistic competition. SMRT and ComfortDelGro’s control of the taxi market is reinforced by and reinforces their monopoly of all other forms of public transport in Singapore. I have pointed this out numerous times, most recently on 23rd November in “Another Round of Monopoly Anyone?” (http://sonofadud.com/2011/11/23/another-round-of-monopoly-anyone/). While there may be a high elasticity of substitution between different forms of public transport the elasticity between public transport as a whole and other forms of transport is considerably less.  Commuters would face considerable “sunk costs” in switching to private transport and this is not available to any but the highest income groups. The monopolists are able to maximise profits across public transport as a whole and given that demand will be fairly inelastic have a fair ability to raise prices. The only constraint is the Public Transport Council which in the same way as the NTA is filled with government and company-friendly appointees and thus unlikely to be as tough in defence of consumers’ interests as it should be.

In this environment, it would not make any sense for the marginal operators, i.e. Transcab, Premier, SMART and the remaining Yellow Top taxis, to undercut them. If they do so, they would not gain much extra business and risk the dominant operators reducing their prices to drive them out of business. By setting their prices at the same level as the market leader, the industry as a whole maximises revenue and the revenue is shared out according to market share.  In economic terms SMRT and Comfort and CityCab are price-makers and the others are price-takers. Without doing anything to break up the dominance of the two government-linked entities, it becomes irrelevant whether there is any overt price-fixing agreement or other evidence of collusion. The prices of taxi services will still end up at or close to the level a profit-maximising monopolist would set.

The problem therefore is the dominance of the two government linked entities. The monopoly rents are unlikely to accrue to the drivers who have to deal with a monopsonistic market (a limited number of buyers) for their services. Over time the taxi operators are likely to raise their rents and ensure that much of the revenues from higher fares are clawed back from the drivers who constitute an atomistic group without much bargaining power and a fairly elastic supply of new drivers. The industry body which is supposed to represent their interests, the NTA, cannot be said to be independent of the government or its companies since many are MPs or ex-MPs.

While consumers may complain about the fare increases, the fact remains that Singapore taxis are cheaper than in many other cities in the developed world, where often artificial barriers to entry are created. This will be less true after the latest fare hikes. In addition the system of surcharges, which are increased with the latest measures, is badly designed and only succeeds in creating shortages of cabs before and after the surcharge period and long queues of empty taxis during the peak periods.

I have already called for a far greater degree of competition in other areas of public transport, particularly in the provision of bus services. Where more competition is not possible, there should be stronger and more effective regulation, particularly of non-price areas such as frequency of service. With regard to taxis, the decision to phase out independent operators should be reversed provided they meet minimum safety and quality standards. We need to bring back Yellow Taxis and give them freedom to set their own fares and negotiate with their customers. This might eliminate the current demand-supply mismatch at different periods of the day.

Apart from the obvious high rates of return on investment from leasing taxis, perhaps the government was influenced by its desire to see that Singaporeans keep their noses to the grindstone (MM Lee’s “spur in their sides” philosophy or, “You have been given a precious porcelain rice bowl don’t break it!”). The government has always striven to ensure it captures most sources of economic rent.

The underlying monopoly is undoubtedly a more formidable challenge which can only be addressed at the ballot box but it needs to be addressed.  Any call for a CCS investigation of possible “price-fixing” while the underlying monopoly goes unchallenged, is a charade and merely a self promotion exercise for those involved.

You’ll be dead before you can spend it! Singaporeans enter the 20th year of unnecessary, self -imposed austerity.

Nov 29

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Watching the Euro-zone unravel has so far almost been like a moral fable for Singaporeans.   Be honest! Who out there isn’t feeling a sense of Schadenfreude? The original Greek or Irish problem on the periphery of Europe and investor flight from European sovereign debt has spread via Spain and Portugal, to Italy and even France, Austria, the Netherlands and Finland.

This moral fable could be said to illustrate the dangers of profligate governments who have bought electoral popularity with populist policies and high levels of welfare spending and are now paying the price.  As an economist I would say that the only certain moral to this story is, ‘beware the folly of entering a currency union without a fiscal union’.  The rest is open to debate.

In a desperate attempt to stave off default and unlock emergency funding from the ECB and latterly the IMF, those beleaguered states have agreed to scale back their generous social welfare programmes, increase existing taxes and impose new taxes. All of this results in an externally imposed, endless round of “austerity” budgets. As I write it is not only the financial axe that is being wielded.  The Euro-zone governments are discussing a solution which will essentially involve a loss of political and economic sovereignty by the countries facing insolvency.  This prompted one friend to say that the Germans, by having the most competitive exchange rate when entering the Euro (coupled with a high level of productivity and skilled labour) have achieved a mastery over Europe where Hitler failed.

However, the solution being imposed on the weaker economies would be likely to condemn them to years of lost output and slow growth as compared with higher levels of output and employment in the stronger countries. Without a true political union, which is unlikely to be acceptable to the richer Euro-zone countries such as Germany, it is difficult to see how the currency union can survive longer term.

According to the popular logic of the anti-populists such policies as free health care, free education and old age pensions, lead to a lazy workforce that demands uncompetitive levels of wages.  Thankfully for us our wise government has never fallen for the easy route of giving the people what they want (or need or deserve). On the contrary they have ensured that Singaporeans have been kept on an austerity diet almost since independence.   Pity the struggling European economies but don’t forget to look in your own backyard when you shed a tear.

We have very little welfare spending (except the ‘ give-aways’ at election time when the government throws around money away in an untargeted manner) and one of the lowest expenditures as a proportion of GDP in the developed world on education and health.  Let me repeat that.  One of the lowest public expenditures as a proportion of GDP in the developed world on education and health.   As we know the expenditure in terms of private money coming from your own pocket is very high indeed with exam success being directly correlated to expenditure on tuition. In Singapore we are proud to have developed a world class system of ‘hire ‘education. As well as the private financial burden we have the devastating personal social costs of long term medication and care required for old age, cancer, chronic illness or disabilities both physical and mental.

Despite the government’s harping on how this has resulted in low taxes for median-income Singaporeans compared with Europeans, these income groups are not really any better off. Europeans generally receive free health care and completely free education -which is mostly compulsory up to the age of 16. (a vital child protection safeguard).  Singaporeans have to pay for medical care with Medisave and Medishield and are often forced to top this up or go without treatment because of gaps in coverage or inadequate savings.  We also work up to 50% longer hours to achieve living standards on a par with the less affluent Euro-zone countries.

The end result of this scrimping and saving is familiar to all. The Government has run huge and persistent surpluses as a proportion of GDP(between 5% and10% of GDP though in 2007 it was considerably higher than this) for over twenty years. This includes revenues and receipts from current and past reserves as well as revenues from land sales and capital receipts. I believe it is misleading to exclude these revenues and receipts from the Budget.  The Government further disguises its exceedingly comfortable fiscal position by using an accounting convention of subtracting both current and development expenditure from current revenues. It then adds back only (at most) 50% of the revenues from the Sovereign Wealth Funds, Temasek and GIC.  Our Opposition needs to demand a proper accounting

The high levels of government saving are partly responsible for a current account surplus of over 20% of GDP. Because the MAS intervenes to prevent the Singapore $ rising too far, this is reflected in the growing holdings of official reserves and the overseas assets held by our Sovereign Wealth Funds, Temasek and GIC.  It is true that Singapore has avoided a situation where the Government has had to issue foreign currency debt and in fact has a substantial net asset position (particularly when its ownership of 80% of the land is included!). The benefit is that we have avoided the problems of the Euro-zone where the deficit countries are being forced to cut back on spending and raise taxes.

But is this a good thing and does it make our government fiscally wise? In a way that is like saying that a starving man has avoided having a starvation diet imposed on him by voluntarily deciding to impose it on himself first.   Some of you will be acutely aware that those holding the food supplies make sure they themselves have a very rich diet. The wonder is that whilst they earn  millions of dollars for cabinet roles you agree to tighten your belts, take on extra work, move dad into the corridor, rent out your rooms and die slowly without the dignity of care and medication.  If you are still feeling smug bear this in mind. Even with cutbacks the countries embracing austerity programmes will still have almost free public health and education while Singaporeans do not.

There is really no justification for the continual accumulation of reserves and government surpluses once these have reached a level sufficient to provide for a serious crisis. Our Government passed this level some years back but continues to insist on its necessity. Meanwhile CPF holders are being forced to take unilateral changes in the terms on which they can get their money back. This is despite the low returns on  CPF savings having been one of the major contributors to the growth in overseas assets. The present generation of Singaporeans has been robbed, supposedly to pay for a future generation of Singaporeans, despite accelerating technological change and productivity growth making all but certain that future generations will be much richer than the present one.

The big question is will we even benefit from our enormous overseas assets? I believe we are fooling ourselves if we think that by actually saving all this money we will get to spend it or that our children will.  GIC, Temasek and MAS have yet to come clean on how much it has invested in Euro-zone sovereign debt and how much it stands to lose should there be a debt default in the worst case or just a restructuring.  As I said before, there is no-one in Parliament willing or able to demand an account.

Presently the countries that have run large current account deficits for many years, such as the US and many members of the Euro-zone, are acutely aware that the counterpart of their deficits is excessive saving in the surplus countries, mainly China but also Japan, Korea, Germany and of course Singapore. They know this prevents them from being able to achieve satisfactory levels of growth, output and employment. The Euro-zone has already turned to China and asked the Chinese Government to buy more Euro-zone debt. This has allegedly infuriated many ordinary Chinese who complain about how poor they are compared with the average European. Their anger should be directed at their government which has held down consumption and domestic living standards to create a level of reserves far higher than necessary. This has allowed a situation in which they now find themselves held hostage to the debtor nations. It is likely that our Government faces the same pressures from the EU to invest in bailing out the insolvent members of the Euro-zone.

It would be far better if our reserves were spent on benefiting Singaporeans in the first place rather than hijacked by political considerations.  That is why I have consistently called for a reduction in our general budget surplus, measured as widely as possible, to a much lower figure, say under 1% of GDP over the course of an economic cycle. The funds could be invested in basic improvements to Singaporeans’ health and education as well as cutting taxes.

I have also called for the privatization of Temasek and GIC with the distribution of shares to Singaporeans. If they are owned directly by the people then it will be more difficult for them to be held hostage to foreign political pressures.

Posted in Society

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