Hong Kong labour chief says poverty line ‘inadequate’ at reflecting inequality as NGOs urge return of threshold
Hong Kong Free Press
Hong Kong’s labour minister has said using a poverty line to measure inequality was “inadequate,” after pausing the publication of statistics after 2020 despite opposition from NGOs.
Sun instead touted the importance of “targeted” poverty alleviation that focuses on demographics including the elderly and subdivided housing tenants. His comments came after Chief Executive John Lee made no mention of the poverty line at last week’s Policy Address.
“The poverty line is a very simplistic concept… if one only looks at relative income to set a poverty line, there are many inadequacies,” Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun said in Cantonese at a press conference on Monday.
“Under our arrangement of targeted poverty alleviation, we won’t be using [the poverty line],” he added.
Hong Kong introduced a poverty line, defined as any household making less than half the median monthly household income as living in poverty, in 2013. The city released annual figures for the number of people living below the poverty line, but stopped doing so after publishing the figures for 2020.
That year, the government said new measures were needed for measuring poverty instead of the poverty line.
‘Targeted alleviation’
Despite calls from NGOs and scholars for reinstating a poverty line, using new indicators and metrics to address the limitations of the poverty line, Lee did not mention any new poverty index at last week’s Policy Address.
The bureau has said that the current metric uses household income as the sole indicator of poverty, “which may lead to possible over-estimation of the poverty situation.”
“They might have properties, cars, and lots of assets, but the poverty line doesn’t account for that,” Sun said on Monday, adding that the city needed “targeted” poverty alleviation.
In May, the government identified around 950,000 elderly people, single-parent households, and tenants of subdivided flats as targets for its poverty alleviation programme.
Sun said that while the government had a comprehensive social security system, it needed to identify and provide assistance to those at the “end of the queue.”
Not mutually exclusive
Au-Yeung Tat-chor, an assistant professor at Lingnan University specialising in social policy and community development, told HKFP last week that the government’s targeted approach was not mutually exclusive with a poverty line.
The poverty line could still reflect the gap between a low-income family and an average family in Hong Kong, serving as an important reference point to evaluate the city’s poverty situation, he said.
See also: HK Policy Address 2024: NGOs and scholars react to livelihood measures
“This is why some NGOs, and myself, would hope that the government may use a ‘dual-track approach’ – keeping the poverty line and doing targeted poverty alleviation at the same time,” he said.
According to Oxfam earlier this month, more than 1.39 million Hongkongers were living in poverty in the first quarter of 2024, with the city’s richest earning 81 times more than its poorest.
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