Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0316/03168.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 19KB | 304 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03168}
$Pretitle{384}
$Title{Singapore
Chapter 4B.   Social Change and the Individual}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Nena Vreeland}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{social
family
percent
economic
housing
income
mobility
population
community
hdb}
$Date{1976}
$Log{}
Country:     Singapore
Book:        Singapore, A Country Study
Author:      Nena Vreeland
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1976

Chapter 4B.   Social Change and the Individual

     Accompanying the social and economic transformation that has taken place
in Singapore since the mid-1960s have been changes in occupational structure,
income distribution, and residence patterns. These have all affected the
social relations of the individual with his family and neighbors and his
perception of himself, his values, and his expectations.

     The growth of the manufacturing sector of the economy has changed the
composition of the labor force. Self-employed entrepreneurs have given way to
factor production workers, as shown in the continuing increase in the latter
occupations as a proportion of the labor force, the declining proportion of
self-employed persons, and the growing proportion of employees (see ch. 2).
Industrialization has thus served to break down the traditional lines of
economic specialization among and within ethnic groups. Economist Pang Eng
Fong observes that

these occupational and industrial concentrations along ethnic or dialect lines
are gradually being eroded by the spread of education and the process of
industrialization which has created new organizations and a demand for new
skills and occupations. Further, the strong tendencies of existing firms to
hire on particularistic criteria have been tempered by the influx of foreign
companies, and the increasing use of educational credentials as a screening
device.

     Not only have the traditional economic roles of different groups been
breaking down, but the nepotism that supported those divisions is being
replaced with a meritocratic system in which education has become a route of
upward mobility. This change is also reflected in the increasing educational
level of the labor force; in 1974 over 28 percent of employed persons had at
least a secondary school certificate. Another result of the growth of the
manufacturing sector has been increased employment of women; female labor
force participation rates increased from 24.6 per 100 population in 1970 to
29.6 in 1975.

     Chinese and Malays have tended to benefit more from industrialization
than have Indians, largely because Indians have remained in their occupations
in trading and the professions. The largest proportion of self-employed and
unpaid family workers, such as entrepreneurs and hawkers, has remained among
the Chinese.

     The industrialization process has been partly responsible for changes in
income distribution within the population. Although increases in individual
and household income have not kept pace with growth in the gross domestic
product (GDP-see Glossary) and inflation has more than eaten up gains in wages
in the early 1970s-the price, according to Lee, that Singapore must pay for
economic growth-the distribution of income throughout the society has become
much more nearly equal. Pang has characterized the shift in income
distribution between 1966 and 1973 as "a massive increase in the number and
proportion of middle-income earners." Over 43 percent of individuals earned
less than S$150 (for value of the Singapore dollar-see Glossary) monthly in
1963 compared with slightly more than 25 percent in 1973. An analysis of
quintile shares-that is, what proportion of total income was received by each
fifth of the population-shows that the wealthiest fifth reduced its share of
total income by 5 percent to the benefit of all others, especially the third
and fourth wealthiest fifths of the population. In 1973 the middle third of
the population was earning 24.5 percent of all income-a far larger share than
is usually the case in a developing nation. Greater equity in income
distribution, however, has not necessarily meant an increase in real income.
Inflation in the 1973-75 period actually reduced the mean income of all wage
earners in real dollars.

     The poorest segments of the population have increased their share of the
total income much more slowly, and in 1973 the poorest fifth of the population
received only 5 percent of total income. But, unlike most countries in the
process of national economic development and industrialization, in Singapore
it has not been a matter of the rich getting richer and the poor getting
poorer. The burden of inflation on the poorer segments of society has been
partly offset by government provision of low-cost housing, health care,
education, and other social services, thus considerably reducing the greatest
drain on poor and middle-class household expenditures.

     Even more than economic changes the movement of one-half of the
population into public housing in a fifteen-year period has had an impact on
the social organization and the values of the people. Traditional community
structures and institutions and, according to some observers, the nature of
family relations as well have changed as a result of these conditions.
Singaporean social scientists are divided among themselves as to the true
impact of HDB housing and increased occupational mobility on family
structures. All agree that the nuclear family has become the basic family unit
among HDB apartment dwellers rather than the multigeneration extended family
traditional in Chinese and Indian social organization. But some observers,
such as Roy Nyce, maintain that for Singaporean Chinese and Indians the
extended family as the basic unit of residence and authority was more often an
unrealized ideal than a reality. He points out that, because Singapore's
population was created as much by immigration as by natural increase, many
young people have never even seen their grandparents, who were either dead or
still in China or India, much less lived with them in an extended family unit,
and he further suggests that the nuclear family had already become the
predominant pattern in the 1950s. Extended family living, to whatever extent
it may have existed, was largely a concomitant of family-owned and -operated
businesses and, as they have declined with economic change, so probably has
the extended family.

     Other observers have questioned the extent to which movement into the
single-family units of HDB housing and the greater independence of young
people has changed loyalty to the extended family. Stephen H. K. Yeh, an
authority on the sociology of HDB tenants, has flatly asserted that "public
housing so far has no significant effect in the reduction of households with
larger size and more complex structure." Ann Wee has observed that, although
extended families may no longer function as residential units, they tend to
retain an identity as a social unit by living in separate but proximal housing
units and by sharing meals and a common food budget. She suggests that this is
done not so much from a desire to economize on food costs as from a desire to
preserve extended family ties.

     Moreover children tend to stay in the parental home until marriage, even
though this has increasingly come to mean the mid-twenties for most, when all
but a few have finished their educations and are economically independent.
This is thought to have a significant economic impact, since the addition of
children's incomes enables many families to purchase luxuries and consumer
durables, but perhaps an additional effect is raising the material
expectations of young people. It can be argued that the pattern of remaining
in the parental home is primarily a result of Singapore's chronic housing
shortage. But the alternative explanation, that children stay at home out of a
desire to preserve a close relationship with their parents and siblings,
cannot be automatically discounted; it is further supported b