Hong Kong’s labour minister, Chris Sun, has emphasized the need for a more targeted approach to poverty alleviation rather than relying solely on a poverty line to measure inequality. Sun expressed concerns about the limitations of using relative income to set a poverty line, stating that it may not accurately reflect the true poverty situation in the city.
The poverty line, which was introduced in 2013, defined households making less than half of the median monthly income as living in poverty. However, the government stopped publishing annual figures on the number of people living below the poverty line after 2020, citing the need for new measures to measure poverty effectively.
Despite calls from NGOs and scholars to reinstate the poverty line with new indicators and metrics, Chief Executive John Lee did not mention any new poverty index in the recent Policy Address. Sun highlighted the importance of targeted poverty alleviation, focusing on demographics such as the elderly and tenants of subdivided flats.
In May, the government identified around 950,000 elderly people, single-parent households, and subdivided flat tenants as targets for its poverty alleviation programme. Sun acknowledged that while Hong Kong has a comprehensive social security system, there is a need to identify and assist those who are most in need.
Au-Yeung Tat-chor, an assistant professor specializing in social policy and community development, suggested that a dual-track approach could be beneficial, where both the poverty line and targeted poverty alleviation are used simultaneously. This approach could help provide a comprehensive understanding of the poverty situation in Hong Kong.
According to Oxfam, more than 1.39 million Hongkongers were living in poverty in the first quarter of 2024, with a significant wealth gap between the city’s richest and poorest residents. The debate over the effectiveness of the poverty line and the need for targeted poverty alleviation continues as the government explores new measures to address the issue of poverty in Hong Kong.
