Economists Yeoh Lam Keong, Manu Bhaskaran, Donald Low and Tan Kim Song set out key principles that should guide the state’s support for the private sector, the poor and the unemployed in what is turning out to be a cataclysmic disaster. An economic crisis looms, with medium-term impacts on our well-being which could well rival […]
Linda Lim, Gunalan Nadarajan and Jessie Yang—Singaporean professors at the University of Michigan—make a case for the arts and humanities in the age of tech and coronavirus. COVID-19 has caused a marked shift in scientific research around the world away from other problems toward investigating and fighting the virus. This will take much time to […]
Jung Jong Hyun, assistant professor at NTU, has been researching social determinants of mental health, using the stress process model as a guiding framework. Here he examines how COVID-19 can undermine mental health and how we can cope with it. (Banner photo: Amanda Ho) Another month! After hearing about the Circuit Breaker extension, I wondered […]
Chong Ja Ian, Harvard-Yenching Institute Visiting Scholar 2019-2020, argues that the pandemic reveals the need for Singapore to reconsider how it makes decisions about national directions and policy trade-offs. (Banner photo credit: Sumita Thiagarajan) Singapore’s state-affiliated mainstream media has lately been publishing pieces relating to inequality. Undoubtedly, this has to do with the disproportionate economic […]
Chong Ja Ian, Harvard-Yenching Institute Visiting Scholar 2019-2020, considers the external political environment that Singapore will face in light of the pandemic. As Singapore grapples with increasing COVID-19 infections and their consequences, a post-pandemic world awaits. This environment will differ from the one we all left behind in 2019 and the shifts will not only be economic. […]
Howard Lee, PhD candidate at Murdoch University, argues that there is a need for the Singapore government to rethink its rules-based approach in order to suppress community spread of COVID-19. It is still early days yet in tackling COVID-19, but no less opportune a time to review the role of authoritarian governance in combating the […]
18 April 2020 FROM THE EDITORS It’s only April, but 2020 feels like a different universe from 2019. The locking down of the world’s population—unimaginable just months ago—has forged a shared reality and trauma. In this collective trauma, we seem to also witness a moment of heightened consciousness—that we have been living in great injustice, […]
Donald Low, Professor of Practice in Public Policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, argues that it would not be fair to blame the Singapore government for missteps that are apparent only in hindsight. The crisis in foreign worker dormitories, on the other hand, was predicted. The government’s failure to act quickly […]
Linda Lim, Professor Emerita at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, considers future directions for Singapore’s economy, including the need to reconsider existing approaches and reorient to a likely increasingly deglobalized world. My recent commentary in the Straits Times discussed how the world and national economies are likely to change as […]
Teo You Yenn is Associate Professor, Provost’s Chair, and Head of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University. This week marks the beginning of the shutdown of schools and childcare centres in Singapore. All over the island, in households with children, adults are no doubt struggling to maintain some semblance of normalcy in abnormal times. Fixed timetables; […]