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Christopher Balding, an associate professor at Peking University, claims in this note that

Given publicly available economic data on Singaporean finances, there is an expected asset gap of more than $800 billion SGD unaccounted for from historical surpluses and financing operations when factoring in claimed interest.

Here is the accompanying Excel spreadsheet with the data. Here are Balding's blog posts on Singapore.

To my knowledge, these claims of his have received no coverage by the state-controlled media in Singapore. And I can find no serious, in-depth discussion anywhere of the merits and flaws of Balding's claims. So are his claims correct?

Note that S$800b is about 200% of Singapore's annual GDP. In comparison, 200% of US GDP would be US$36 trillion.

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    @KitSunde The "note" as described by the author is not in fact merely that, but it is in fact a [journal preprint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Science_Research_Network) in a similar vein to arXiv for physics. I would argue that the paper, as well as the credentials of the author, make it a notable claim. – March Ho Mar 02 '16 at 04:30
  • Arxiv isn't a real journal. However I see no problem with the analysis. – D J Sims Mar 03 '16 at 09:30

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