Stephen Vines

The View | With its huge reserves, Hong Kong should consider a cash ‘inheritance’ for its young people

Stephen Vines says giving one-off budget ‘sweeteners’ is not an effective way of sharing the wealth. With no public spending reform or universal pension scheme, the next best way may be an idea first proposed by a British think tank: a publicly funded ‘inheritance’ for, say, all 25-year-olds

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The rich-poor gap in Hong Kong is daunting. While one in five people in the city is considered poor, a recent survey found that about one in seven are millionaires, defined as those with liquid assets – deposits, mutual funds and stocks and bonds – of HK$1 million. Photo: AFP

Stephen Vines

Published: 1:11pm, 4 Apr 2018Updated: 10:34pm, 4 Apr 2018

There might just be a way of giving Hong Kong’s least wealthy people a real opportunity to share the considerable wealth that is weighing down the government’s coffers. It may indeed be the only way, given official aversion to fundamental poverty alleviation.

But before we come to this idea, let’s consider the debacle that rejoiced in the name of a budget.

Having insisted that there was no question of including so-called handouts in the budget, the financial secretary was forced to eat his words and dish out a maximum HK$4,000 one-off payment each to the poorest members of the community. In fact, the budget already contained rather bigger handouts to property owners and taxpayers, by way of rates rebates and tax breaks but, as ever, when the higher-paid receive government largesse, it is not described as a handout.

This practice of dishing out one-off “sweeteners” is both irresponsible – because it does not form part of a coherent policy – and ineffective, in either tackling poverty or achieving any specific goals aside from political expediency.

Given that some 20 per cent of Hong Kong’s population live below the poverty line and that there is a daunting gap between the rich and the poor, bumbling on and applying the odd Elastoplast here and there is simply not going to change anything.