Singapore’s government is determined to keep hawker centres alive

Welfare is “a dirty word” in Singapore—or so a past prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, once approvingly declared. What the city-state prizes, he explained, was not handouts, but self-reliance. Workers do not receive a state pension, but pay instead into individual retirement accounts. Health care, too, must be purchased from mandatory savings, not dispensed by a spendthrift state. There is no minimum wage, and no subsidies for staples such as rice or electricity. Oddly, though, there is one aspect of everyday life that almost no other governments get involved in but that the Singaporean authorities are not willing to leave to the vicissitudes of the market: eating out.