Income Inequality in Singapore

Income Inequality in Singapore, By Pundarik Mukhopadhaya. Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2014. Pp. 189.

Dr Pundarik Mukhopadhaya's analysis on Singapore's income inequality from 1980 to 2012 is both insightful and comprehensive. The book opens with an introduction that situates Singapore's economic development in a global context, followed by theories on income inequality in Chapter 2. The subsequent four chapters discuss income inequality within and between the following demographic groups: age and occupation (Chapter 3); residents with different educational levels (Chapter 4); gender (Chapter 5); and older women (Chapter 6). Chapter 7 briefly examines the trade-off between equity and efficiency in Singapore while Chapter 8 summarizes key points of the book.

The book identifies human capital development as the government's primary tenet to reduce income inequality during the period studied. Using available data, Mukhopadhaya explains the role of education and explores the gender dimension in inequality in Singapore. The author successfully achieves this objective via careful explanation and weaving in policy details into each chapter.

A major strength of the book lies in using the Theil index to explain inequality between and within the demographic groups - a tool that was either not available or not as popularly used in an earlier book of the same name by Rao and Ramakrishnan (1980). While the Gini coefficient is also employed in this book, the Theil index allows the author to explain nuances in the data that cannot be revealed through the Gini coefficient. The author decomposes income inequality and finds higher inequality within, rather than between, age groups....