If I were the Finance Minister of Singapore

Singapore Budget

Check this out!

http://app.mof.gov.sg/budget_2007/choice/fiscal_choices.asp

Like the disclaimer said, it’s totally not scientific, but then it’s really an awesome education tool for people. The percentage tweaks is, to me, simply just a hand itchy thing for people to hang around the webapp so that they recognize the various major categories of government Profit & Loss.

Here I made the maximum budget advance of $9B which is around 4.71% of the GDP (money greedy finance minister, I am). Sounds kinda puny actually, but I don’t mind pocketing the difference 😉

max-budget-advance.GIF

I’m surprised that MOF actually pays people to do these cute little things. Oh well, whatever drives the IT industry… There are posters and brochures on the site too.

Updates: The budget is out! Compare answer:

budget2007-1.gif budget2007-2.gif

As usual, a professionally done source of information, a bit boring in the presentation, but I guess that’s required of a government (gahmen have to look dead serious). As this is the first time I’m looking into this, I realize a few weird thing, don’t know if you find it weird too.

Reference: Budget Highlights (pdf)

The countries that Singapore always try to compare to is Hong Kong, Ireland, US, Japan, New Zealand, etc. I mean no offense, but what’s up with New Zealand? Shouldn’t Singapore think about comparing to a wider spread of countries with different circumstances, say, China, Malaysia, Pakistan, Indonesia, or maybe the Argentina, Bhutan and Egypt? None of them are “off the charts” since most of the graphical comparison are percentages anyway (e.g. % of GDP spend on government). Or are you telling me that putting a direct comparison between Singapore and Malaysia or Thailand in a financial budget summary with have forward-looking statements like “Chart 2.1
shows that from the perspectives of both expenditure and revenue, Singapore has one of
the leanest governments in the world” would start an unnecessary PR war on the popular media?

I think it would be worse if the attitude was that Singapore 没有把邻居看在眼里 (didn’t put their neighbours in their eyes). Hopefully this is not the reason. Unfortunately I don’t have energy to find these numbers to do my own comparison… do you?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

One Response

  1. Great find! I’m very amused that the expenditure items are SO incredibly wishy-washy…

    Oh wait, things are falling into place now… *click* 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to Top