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The Hong Kong protests, the US-China trade war blame each other as the city marks a high of 1.5 million below the poverty line … and that’s just for 2019
The number of disadvantaged Hong Kong residents has risen by nearly 100,000 in more than a year, and the city has marked an 11-year high of around 1.5 million people struggling below the poverty line, according to the Latest government report on 2019 figures released on Wednesday. worsening of the problem to “a double blow from local social incidents and [US-China] trade tensions ”that had hit the economy, while social workers warned of an even bleaker outlook this year amid the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the Hong Kong Poverty Situation Report, Kwung Tong recorded the highest poverty rate among districts at 27.2 percent, or 180,300 residents living below the poverty line. Get the latest insights and analysis from our Global Impact newsletter on the great stories originating from China. This was followed by Sham Shui Po and Kwai Tsing, who had a poverty rate of 24.7 percent. . In terms of low-income population figures, Yuen Long had 141,600 while Sha Tin had 137,000. One in five Hong Kong residents living below the poverty line in 2018 The report, which was presented for discussion at Wednesday’s meeting of the Poverty Commission, only covered 2019 and did not yet reflect the impact of the coronavirus. in the city. 21.4% of Hong Kong’s population, or about 1.49 million people, with 649,000 families, lived below the poverty line. In 2018, the figures were 20.4 percent, or 1.4 million people spread across 613,000 families. Last year’s figures were the highest since records began in 2009, when 1.35 million people or 20.6 percent of the population lived below the poverty line. Despite the bleak trend, officials argued that the reality was not so bad. They noted that after taking into account several unique social security allocations and government aid subsidies, a closer analysis showed that the poverty rate was only 9.2%, or a population of 642,000. This so-called post-intervention rate compared favorably with that in 2018 of 9.3 percent. Still, the number of people in the low-income group had increased slightly from 638,000 in 2018, but the government also expressed concern about an increase in poor working households. Despite the social security benefits, “more than 35 percent of the increase in the poor population in 2019 came from working households,” he said, contrary to past trends in which this was attributable to economically inactive families. Poor Hong Kong: Life is harder for the elderly, the unemployed and single parents “This illustrated that the weakened economic environment with fewer job opportunities would have a negative influence on the situation of the working poor,” the government said in a release. He said that social unrest and the trade war between the United States and China were to blame for the worsening poverty rate. “As local social incidents caused severe disruption and hit consumer and tourism-related sectors that involved substantially lower-skilled jobs, grassroots families were particularly affected,” the report says. “All of these unfavorable developments, along with accelerated aging … and the continued decline in household size, put unprecedented upward pressure on poverty indicators. ”However, the report said the government had done much to alleviate poverty, citing figures such as welfare that had doubled to HK $ 93.9 billion in 2020-21, compared to 2012-13. Hong Kong’s economy entered recession in the second half of 2019, contracting by 2.8% and 3% year-on-year in the third and third semesters of 2019. fourth quarters respectively, and by 1.2 percent for 2019 as a whole. Ze Lai-shan, from the Society for Organiz Community Action, warned that more Hong Kong residents could fall below the poverty line in 2020, in the wake of the Covid-19 economic recession. He urged the government to introduce subsidies for the unemployed or unemployment insurance. “A lot of overseas countries are having those subsidies,” Sze said, adding: “We can’t wait until it’s too late.” Of the cases that our group has been handling, we have already noticed that many families faced financial problems because their breadwinners were left without work due to the pandemic. And the government aid funds seem to benefit bosses or business owners more than weed. -roots people who are really in need, ”said Sze, who is also on the Poverty Commission. Professor Terence Chong Tai-leung, an economist at the Lau Chor Tak Institute of Global Economics and Finance at Chinese University, was less concerned. “We are talking about relative poverty here, a condition in which family income is set as a certain percentage below the median income.” Even if all the people of Hong Kong earned several billion dollars a year, it could be considered that about 20% of them still live below the poverty line. In accordance with common practice in other economies, Hong Kong also sets the poverty line at 50% of the median monthly household income, based on family size. In 2019, the median monthly income for a two-person household was HK $ 28,900, while that of a four-person unit was HK $ 43,500, according to the Department of Census and Statistics. As household assets are not taken into account, the government has treated the poverty line analysis as a framework to help understand the forms of poverty and monitor the situation. You have expressed your opinion that setting the poverty line does not mean that the administration should automatically offer subsidies to individuals or households below the mark. This article Hong Kong protests, the trade war between the United States and China is attributed to the city marking a maximum of 1.5 million below the poverty line. . and that’s only for 2019 first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest South China Morning Post news, please download our mobile app. Copyright 2020.
