Hong Kong | One in five live in poverty, government study shows

A couple walk past an elderly woman who is trying to find something to eat next to a rubbish bin on a street in Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s Commission on Poverty released on Friday the latest official data on the city’s lowest earners, showing a slight increase in the proportion of people earning less than HKD4,000 per month.

As many as one in five people in Hong Kong – which is home to a population of around seven million – live in relative poverty, earning less than half of the city’s HKD8,000 median wage.

The pre-intervention poverty figure was 1.35 million people in 2016, or a poverty rate of 19.9 percent, representing a slight rise from 2015. According to the government, this is the highest it has been since 2009.

After accounting for financial assistance from the Hong Kong government – known as “recurrent cash policy intervention” – the 2016 poverty rate drops to 14.7 percent or almost one million people, up by about 0.4 percentage points from the previous year.

Matthew Cheung, chairperson of Hong Kong’s Commission on Poverty, said the overall size of the population living in poverty remained mostly stable last year, holding steady at under one million for the fourth consecutive year.

“On the back of moderate economic growth and a stable labor market in 2016, there was an across-the-board rise in poverty line thresholds due to an increase in household income,” said Cheung.

Hong Kong’s criteria to determine whether an individual lives in poverty are based solely on income level. They do not take into account any other assets or non-recurring subsidies, such as public housing provision.

According to Cheung, when public housing provision is taken into consideration, the proportion of those living in poverty is effectively halved to 10.4 percent, or slightly over 700,000 people.

However, Cheung noted that Hong Kong’s aging population would affect this assessment in the near future, as most of these people included in the survey will no longer be earning income.

In Macau, the proportion of people living in relative poverty is believed to be far lower, though the government does not provide extensive data or explain its criteria.

The MSAR government officially lists the poverty rate at 2.3 percent, but Caritas Macau has estimated that it is closer to 10 percent, with approximately 7 percent struggling to fulfill basic needs such as food.

The median wage taking into account both residents and non-residents in Macau is significantly higher than in Hong Kong, at about MOP15,000 in 2016. DB