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But the cost of the journey from home to destination is actually $1.40. We should be comparing $1.40 with other countries, not $0.80 or $0.60 separately. Comparing $0.80 or $0.60 with other countries makes us look cheap when the actual cost is $1.40. The more hub and spoke a transport model is, the greater the distortion between cost of home-to-destination journeys and cost of individual MRT and bus journeys. EIU is therefore correct to exclude public transport costs because they never truly reflect the cost of public transport in Singapore anyway.
Mr Tharman then claimed that few surveys measure living costs of ordinary residents and went on to cite the one from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy as the one that does. But the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy survey is quite a useless survey because it is almost never used by anyone outside Singapore. It is almost like North Korean statistics useful only within North Korea.
Straits Times also quoted former MP Calvin Cheng saying rental rates were taken from Orchard Road whereas most Singaporeans live in HDB flats [4]. Does Mr Cheng not know that housing rents are excluded from the index calculation and hence does not impact our cost of living ranking?
If housing rents and international school fees had been included in the index calculation, Singapore cost of living would have shot up even more.
In conclusion, the state and its media, by listing only a handful of the more than 400 individual prices across 160 products and services in the EIU survey, failed to show that the items are generally expat-centric and irrelevant to Singaporeans.
- http://trulysingapore.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/singapores-no-1-ranking-in-eiu-cost-of-living-survey/
Mr Tharman then claimed that few surveys measure living costs of ordinary residents and went on to cite the one from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy as the one that does. But the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy survey is quite a useless survey because it is almost never used by anyone outside Singapore. It is almost like North Korean statistics useful only within North Korea.
Straits Times also quoted former MP Calvin Cheng saying rental rates were taken from Orchard Road whereas most Singaporeans live in HDB flats [4]. Does Mr Cheng not know that housing rents are excluded from the index calculation and hence does not impact our cost of living ranking?
If housing rents and international school fees had been included in the index calculation, Singapore cost of living would have shot up even more.
In conclusion, the state and its media, by listing only a handful of the more than 400 individual prices across 160 products and services in the EIU survey, failed to show that the items are generally expat-centric and irrelevant to Singaporeans.
- http://trulysingapore.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/singapores-no-1-ranking-in-eiu-cost-of-living-survey/
