Growth, Opportunity, and Inequality: Some Empirics from Singapore

• Main Author: HO, Kong Weng
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2011
• Subjects: Asian Studies; Economics; Growth and Development
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/1659; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soe_research/article/2658/viewcontent/GrowthOpportunityEmpricsSingapore_2011.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

While the strategy of openness had earned Singapore rapid economic growth, upward social mobility, and possibly decreasing inequality in the early years of development, the more recent years has seen increasing inequality. With this inequality comes an underlying possibly diminished upward inter-generational mobility, due to skill-biased growth processes, skill-biased parental influence, liberalisation in the education industry, and structural changes in the society, which hurt the human capital accumulation of children in families under economic and intra-household stresses. In particular, paternal influence on educational aspirations and attainment is more pronounced than maternal influence. Non-Chinese and youths from disrupted families are worse off in both educational aspirations and educational attainment.