Facing a rapidly ageing population, Singapore is presented with urgent policy challenges. Yet there is very little data on the economic, health and family circumstances of older Singaporeans. In response, the Centre for Research on the Economics of Ageing (CREA) at Singapore Management University has been collecting monthly data on a panel of Singaporeans aged between 50 and 70 years. We detail the methodology by which the Singapore Life Panel® (SLP) was constructed using a population-representative sampling frame from the Singapore Department of Statistics. Contact was made with 25,000 households through postal, phone and in-person canvassing. More than 15,200 respondents from over 11,500 households enrolled in the panel. Comparisons between SLP and official statistics show close matching on age, sex, marital status, ethnicity, education, labor force status, income and expenditure. This suggests that the panel is a representative of Singapore's elderly population. Monthly surveys continue to be administered over the internet, supplemented by phone and in-person outreach to ensure the panel remains representative and hence reliable for informing policy makers. Response rates are remarkably stable at over 8,000 per month. The SLP contains rich data on demographics, health status, socio-economic indicators, contact with government programs and subjective perceptions and is likely to be a key resource for economic research into ageing in Singapore.

Housing affordability for elderly homeowners involves an entirely different set of issues as compared to housing affordability for first-time homeowners. To afford to ‘age-in-place’ may require homeowners to access channels that enable them to withdraw their housing equity to finance consumption in retirement. We utilize data from the Singapore Life Panel© survey to empirically investigate the impact of housing equity on the consumption of elderly households. Based on panel analysis, we find housing equity value has no significant impact on non-durable consumption for elderly people. The conclusion holds for a battery of robustness checks. Moreover, heterogeneity analyses based on subsamples by the health condition, the age of household head, the house type, and the number of properties owned also show no significant impact of housing equity on consumption. Finally, we use scenario analysis to study the Lease Buyback Scheme (LBS), a novel housing equity monetization scheme that allows elderly households to unlock housing equity for retirement financing. An individual scenario analysis reveals positive but negligible effects, which may explain the low take-up rate for the LBS.

In recent years, governments in rapidly aging countries have looked toward the implementation of public insurance schemes to help cover the costs of care for their aging citizenry. This article presents a comprehensive overview of long-term care insurance policy in Singapore. We discuss the successes and challenges of nearly two decades (2002–2019) of policy experimentation with a voluntary long-term care insurance scheme, which was replaced by mandatory social insurance in the 2019 reform. Various aspects of the new scheme, including mode of financing, eligibility criteria, benefit design, and potential impacts are assessed. The article concludes that, in the inherent tension between the breadth and depth of public long-term care social insurance coverage, Singapore has opted for breadth at the expense of depth. © 2021 Taylor & Francis.