(Left to right) Dennis Tan Lip Fong, Dylan Ng Foo Eng, Raeesah Begum Bte Farid Khan,
Jamus Jerome Lim Chee Wui
and Ron Tan Jun Yen from the Workers' Party.
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JAMUS LIM
Dr Jamus Lim, 44, is Associate Professor of economics at Essec Business School. He had been a lead economist with the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and a senior economist with the World Bank before that.
His academic credentials include a doctorate from the University of California, a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern Queensland. He also did a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.
Dr Lim has been seen on the ground in the newly formed Sengkang GRC.
During the press conference, he spoke about the local education system which he described as a “pressure cooker” with children attending extra tuition and supplementary classes after school. While Singapore has "one of the world's best performing school systems", he questioned what the focus on outcomes has meant in terms of opportunities for Singaporeans.
“I believe that we have allowed superficial success in our educational system to blind us to the fact that this system isn't working and our education system is not preparing our children to actually take on and create good jobs for the future,” he said.
“I want to ask these kind of questions for the sake of my eight-month-old daughter but I also want to ask them for the sake of all children."
Mr Lim also raised questions about retirement adequacy, difficulties faced by the sandwich generation, how to raise productivity of workers and whether there are ways to spend government budgets "more wisely" and find alternative sources of income other than taxes.
"I believe that these are real problems and we can only resolve these most difficult questions when there is actually a healthy, active debate and an honest debate about solutions," he said.
"Today this debate does not occur because there isn't enough opposition voice in Parliament."
