Superstar Cities (a term coined by three US urban economists) are characterized by persistently higher than average house price growth and also higher levels of economic inequality.

In her Celia Moh Professorial Chair Public Lecture "Superstar Cities, Inequality and Housing Policy" on 23 March 2015, Professor Phang Sock Yong of SMU School of Economics contended that although the Gini coefficient of Singapore, a global superstar city, is higher that most of the high income OECD countries, it is not appropriate to compare it with country-level Gini coefficients as national inequality measures mask considerable variations across cities within the same country. She said, “Singapore’s Gini coefficient is comparable to other cities of similar size, and lower than that of New York, London and Hong Kong.”

The Celia Moh Professorial Chair was established in Year 2000 by the late Mr Laurence Moh, former Chairman of Plantation Timber Products, in honour of his wife Celia Moh. The award serves to promote and recognise the outstanding work of a female faculty member in SMU. In 2014, Prof Phang became the first full time faculty member at SMU to hold the honour. She will retain the Celia Moh Professorial Chair for 2015 due to her outstanding work in the past year.

In her lecture, Prof Phang reviewed Thomas Piketty’s (author of the 2014 bestseller ‘Capital in the 21^st Century’) concerns about wealth distribution and his tax proposals, and Henry George’s (author of the 1879 bestseller ‘Progress and Poverty’) land value tax.

She then went on to demonstrate how Singapore’s housing wealth redistribution framework can be interpreted as containing elements of both writers’ tax proposals, as well as other significant and innovative institutions and policies.

The latter included three important pieces of legislation passed in the 1960s when the foundations of Singapore’s policies for urban transformation were being laid, namely the Land Acquisition Act 1966, the Housing and Development Board Act and amendments to the Central Provident Fund Act.  As a result of a carefully structured framework which channeled resources to the HDB homeownership sector, a homeownership rate of 90% was achieved by the 1990s. In the 1990s, HDB resale market deregulation and asset enhancement schemes led to significant increases in HDB housing asset values. In the past decade, the housing tax and subsidy code has become more progressive.

Professor Phang concluded that Singapore has, in contrast to other global superstar cities, managed to harness the entire spectrum of land and housing policies to ensure homeownership affordability and reduce housing wealth inequality. 

[Caption: Professor Phang Sock Yong compared income inequality and housing affordability between Singapore with other Superstar Cities in the Celia Moh Professorial Chair Public Lecture.]