In recent years, although the government in Hong Kong has introduced the minimum wage and established the poverty line to assist the poverty-stricken, the issue of poverty in Hong Kong is not obviously improved. In 2012, the Gini coefficient reaches 0.537 and according to the instruction of the United Nations, when the index is more than 0.4, that means the distribution of wealth is extremely uneven and the government needs to take action to cope with poverty immediately. Hereby, the most serious public management challenge in Hong Kong is poverty. The underprivileged in Hong Kong are not the minority. The HKSAR government statistics shows that the number of people in poverty was 1.312 million and the percentage of the poverty accounted for 19.6% of overall population in 2013, so if the government wants to settle this problem, such as increase of the subsidy for the poor, it needs to put a lot of resources. Take the policy address (2014) as an example, the government would spend around 200 billion on helping the poverty regularly¸ such as low-income working family allowance and Community Care Fund. Thus, poverty alleviation burdens the financial pressure of the government and this is a public management challenge. It is hard for the government and citizens to reach a consensus on the strategy of poverty. Last year, the Court of Final Appeal ruled that the policy of rejecting new migrants who live in Hong Kong less than 7 years applying comprehensive social security allowance (CSSA) was unconstitutional. The Liberal Party conducted a survey interviewing around 1,600 people and found that approximately 80% interviewees were dissatisfied with the judgment because they believe that loosening the requirement of applying CSSA damages the public benefits and encourages people inclining to be lazy. When the government in Hong Kong would like to implement the policy of helping the poverty, it needs to balance various opinions from different backgrounds. For achieving this goal is tough, dealing with poverty is a public management challenge. The inflation in Hong Kong causes that poverty becomes acute. According to the official figure, the inflation rate in 2013 was about 4% and it keeps increasing in the past few years, so low-income families, in particular, suffer this hardship mostly. Even though the Hong Kong government can alleviate this issue via the regulation of the market, such as reducing the land supply and distributing cash to individuals directly, it may be blamed by other shareholders in society, such as developers and businessmen since Hong Kong promotes the free market. It means the government should not disturb the function of the market and avoid Hong Kong become society of welfarism. Thereby, the power of the government in market is limited and this is a public management challenge. The population policy is not controlled by the HKSAR government. For instance, around 150 people from Mainland China can hold their one-way permits immigrating into Hong Kong and a great deal of babies whose parents are not Hong Kong permanent residents born in Hong Kong. The official data suggests that the number of babies whose parents are non-HK-residents reached approximately 91,558 in 2012. This population policy causes that the government hardy introduces the suitable long-term policy to help people in poverty because it cannot estimate the number of Hong Kong people and arrange financial reserve for the use of the future. That is the reason why poverty is a public management challenge. To conclude, poverty is the most serious public management challenge in Hong Kong. In current situation, the HK government cannot eradicate poverty completely through policy owing to lack of resource and social consensus. However, it can change the inclination of the policy to create opportunities to help those in poverty by self-reliance instead of only supporting the financial assistance. (3110)
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 09:36:22 +0000
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