SINGAPORE: Social spending, which has almost doubled over the last decade, is expected to go up in the upcoming Budget which will be delivered on Friday (Feb 16).
Overall social spending rose from S$27.6 billion (US$20.5 billion) in 2014, to an estimated S$52.8 billion last year, according to annual figures from the Ministry of Finance (MOF).
The sharpest increase was in 2020, when spending rose by nearly S$10 billion from the year before, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The healthcare sector accounted for the lion’s share of social spending over the last decade, ballooning from S$7 billion in 2014 to nearly S$17 billion last year. It replaced education as the largest component.
Most of this went into supporting a growing ageing population.
Higher spending on healthcare is expected as a society matures and develops, said Professor Paulin Straughan from the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University.
While Singaporeans are living longer, there is a big gap of about 10 years between life expectancy and health-adjusted life expectancy, said Prof Straughan, who is also director of the Centre for Research on Successful Ageing.
“We are not fully leveraging the potential of extended longevity. This explains the sharp increase in healthcare spending,” she told CNA’s Singapore Tonight on Wednesday.
“A lot of work ahead of us is on the preventive health front, where we try to level up and prepare ourselves for living longer and learn to take good care of our bodies and preserve our health so that we can close the gap between health-adjusted life expectancy and life expectancy.”