The Census and Statistics Department (C&SD) released the results of its latest study on household income distribution in Hong Kong yesterday.The city's Gini co-efficient, which indicates income inequality, was 0.539 in 2016, a record high in 50 year.The results of the study immediately aroused wide concerns in society, with some questioning the effectiveness of the government's poverty-alleviation policies and welfare measures and some worrying whether widening wealth gap would affect social stability.
Regarding such concerns, Secretary for Labour and Welfare Stephen Sui Wai-keung maintained that the data did not show a complete picture. He explained that population ageing had accelerated in recent years, but the Gini co-efficient was calculated based on household income without taking household assets into account. Helped by government's poverty-alleviation and welfare measures and the Statutory Minimum Wage (SMW), local low-income people's actual incomes have increased in past several years, so the wealth gap in fact has been narrowing instead of widening.
Is income inequality in Hong Kong increasing or reducing? Is the Gini coefficient reliable? Such a major social problem indeed must be weighed and reckoned up both statistically and realistically. Only in this way can results that best tally with the truth of the matter be possibly derived.
As a matter of fact, poverty alleviation, elderly care and support for the disadvantaged are always a key area of focus of the incumbent government, and given resources inputs accordingly. Compared with the 2012-13 fiscal year when the current-term government just took office, recurrent expenditure in social welfare in the current fiscal year will increase to $73.3 billion, up 71 per cent.
This shows the SAR Government's commitment to support for the disadvantaged and people in need. The current-term government has introduced two pertinent support measures: the Old Age Living Allowance (OALA) and Low-income Working Family Allowance (LIFA) Scheme. The former is benefiting 450,000 elderly people aged 65 or older, while the latter benefiting over 110,000 members of low-income families including over 50,000 children, which is of help to ease intergenerational poverty. As labour policy is concerned, the current-term government has already raised SMW three times and improved the Work Incentive Transport Subsidy (WITS) Scheme.
Therefore, there is no doubt that in the past two decades since Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty and especially after the current Leung Chun-ying administration took office, measures of care and support for low-income families and persons are forceful and well in place. It is unfair for the opposition to deny the government's poverty-alleviation and elderly-care policies and measures using the Gini coefficient or other cases. A focus of Chief Executive-elect Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor in her previous post as the Chief Secretary for Administration has been on poverty alleviation and elderly care, including personally overseeing the work of Commission on Poverty including the Community Care Fund (CCF). After she takes office on July 1, efforts for poverty alleviation and elderly care will only be strengthened rather than weakened. There is no doubt about it.
On the other hand, poverty alleviation, elderly care and support for the disadvantaged are not just the government's responsibilities. All social sectors and even political parties should also share their relevant responsibilities. Only in this way can there be real improvement. In the past, opposition lawmakers opposed whatever the SAR Government proposed. Even with regard to fund applications for poverty alleviation and elderly care, they also wanted to block with filibustering. The proposal for an increase in OALA in this year's Budget was not passed until last week. Although the government promised to make retrospective payment, yet hundreds of thousands of elderly people have to wait until the middle of next year to receive the new OALA. Surely the opposition is not meant to put elderly people in a difficult position?
Needless to say, despite the government's explicit poverty alleviation policy and in-place measures, there are still families having to live in partitioned flats and elderly people having to scavenge cardboard boxes. The recent tragedy of an old man in his 80s turning himself in after killing his wife makes one want to cry out of pity. The in-coming government must strengthen efforts to alleviate poverty. After all, looking after the elderly and enabling children to grow up is the government's bounden duty. 13 June 2017
