SINGAPORE — Singapore will substantially raise ministerial salaries after determining that the best way to ensure government understands ordinary citizens is to recruit leaders whose compensation increasingly resembles that of people ordinary citizens occasionally see through restaurant windows.
Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s annual salary will rise 64% to S$3.6 million, while junior ministers could eventually earn as much as S$1.8 million depending on performance and responsibilities. Singapore benchmarks ministerial compensation against the country’s top 1,000 earners, whose qualities and abilities officials believe reflect the calibre required for good government.
The system ensures policymakers remain closely connected to everyday concerns such as grocery prices, housing affordability and whether the family office’s second Gulfstream should be depreciated over five years or seven.
Officials have long argued that high political salaries are necessary to attract exceptional talent and deter corruption, creating the rare public-service model in which sacrifice is considered an unacceptable barrier to public service.
The new pay structure is expected to help ministers better understand the economic pressures facing Singaporeans by ensuring they experience almost none of them personally.
Officials stressed that governing ordinary people does not require sharing their economic circumstances.
It merely requires paying policymakers enough that they never have to.
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