Defence spending 25%, education 21%

Defence gets the lion's share, as usual, of the Singapore budget for the financial year 2010, beginning in April. Education comes second.

Defence gets 11.5 billion Singapore dollars (SGD11.5 billion or about $8 billion) — that is, 25 per cent of the total estimated expenditure, according to the Finance Ministry.

Education gets more than SGD9.6 billion, or 21 per cent.

The expenditure estimates posted on the Finance Ministry website total 46.3 billion Singapore dollars (SGD46.3 billion), as shown in this chart.

That does not include the SGD5.2 billion of special transfers to top up Medisave accounts and set up a National Productivity Fund.

Those raise the budget to SGD51.5 billion (about S36.6 billion). Government revenue is estimated at SGD48.6 billion. So there will be a deficit of nearly SGD3 billion — about 1.1 per cent of the GDP — Singapore's third deficit in a row, according to the Straits Times.

Transport gets the third biggest share — nearly 5 billion Singapore dollars, or 11 per cent; followed by health care, just over 4.1 billion Singapore dollars, or 9 per cent. Next in line is the Home Affairs Ministry, in charge of internal security. It gets more than 3.1 billion Singapore dollars, or 7 per cent.

Defence spending amounts to nearly 4.5 per cent of the GDP at current market prices, but is nearly 5 per cent of the GDP at 2000 market prices.

Singapore's gross domestic product fell 3.3 per cent last year from SGD266.3 billion to SGD257.6 billion, at current market prices. (See chart here .)

But, based on 2000 market prices, GDP fell only 2 per cent from SGD236.5 billion to SGD231.6 billion. That is why the economy is said to have shrunk by 2 per cent.