Tightening Up Loose Credit and Loosening Up Tight Bankruptcy in Singapore: An Asian Paradigm For Personal Debt and Insolvency Reform

Abstract

Despite its traditionally “tight” social and legal culture, Singapore recently loosened its personal bankruptcy rules significantly. This reform paralleled quite similar moves in the West in recent decades, but it represents a watershed in Asian regulation of the challenges of rising personal debt. Singapore’s impressively deft navigation of a sudden wave of personal overindebtedness between 1995 and 2015 is highly instructive of what a persuasive “Asian” or “tight” strategy for similar moves might look like as neighboring countries in South and East Asia undertake similar reform efforts in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the world's slow recovery from its economic ravages.

Keywords: personal bankruptcy, individual insolvency, consumer bankruptcy, credit regulation, credit rationing, Asian law