“Everybody pays some form of taxes but certainly the ones with greater means – the rich and the higher-income – will have to pay more,” Wong, who’s also the finance minister, said, reiterating a message he has communicated before. “It’s not only done through the taxation system, but we also can do it through transfers and spending and make sure that spending is targeted at the lower-income and those with greater needs.”
Singapore’s next prime minister signalled that the wealthy may face more taxes as the government seeks more inclusive growth in the city-state and looks for ways to shield the most vulnerable groups from the impact of high inflation.
While the country’s income inequality based on the Gini coefficient has been narrowing, the government probably needs to “lean some more in the direction of more inclusive growth,” Lawrence Wong, 49, the country’s deputy prime minister, said in an interview with Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait on Monday. He was referring to an index developed by Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912.
