Highlights of Singapore’s Solidarity Budget 2020
The aim of the Solidarity Budget is to save jobs, protect livelihoods and help businesses preserve their capacity and capabilities.
Eleven days since the Resilience Budget with S$48b worth of support measures was announced, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Mr. Heng Swee Keat, announced a third round of supplementary budget support measures on 6 April 2020 for workers, businesses and households, termed as the Solidarity Budget.
This comes as the COVID-19 outbreak has continued to escalate in the past week, leading to the introduction of circuit breaker measures over a four-week period starting 7 April 2020, which will see all schools and most workplaces closed until 4 May 2020.
The enhancements in the Solidarity Budget will provide further support to protect livelihoods, save jobs and preserve businesses’ capabilities and capacity when the circuit breaker measures are lifted.
The additional measures under the Solidarity Budget will cost a total of S$5.1b, of which S$4b will be used to support businesses and workers, and the remaining S$1.1b for the Solidarity Payment. In total, the Government’s response to COVID-19 will amount to S$59.9b, or about 12% of GDP. The overall budget deficit for FY2020 will increase to S$44.3b or 8.9% of GDP.
Indeed, Singapore’s discipline and prudence in its fiscal practices in the past are now proving to be life-saving in the current volatile times, as the country is able to execute its support packages without burdening future generations. The scale and speed at which the Unity, Resilience and Solidarity Budgets were pushed through are unprecedented.
With these supplementary budgetary measures of extraordinary scale, the Singapore Government hopes to pull the nation through this challenge together, emerge stronger and be ready to ride the next wave of growth.
