They needed our care and we needed to solve the livelihood problems which affected them as quickly as we could, he added.

Mr Tung's words did not sound like casual remarks, although it could not be ascertained whether he had used the term 'poverty line' for the sake of convenience.

'Poverty line' is not a term which officials like to use. In answer to a question in the Legislative Council in early 1995, Secretary for Health and Welfare Katherine Fok Lo Shiu-ching said: 'There appears to be a general consensus amongst experts that 'poverty' as such defies definition - whether in absolute or relative terms or by any other more subjective method.

'To seek to define it or a 'poverty' line for Hong Kong would serve no useful purpose.' For this reason, the Government would not even classify those eligible for cash benefits under the Comprehensive Social Security Assistance as poor.

If Mr Tung was trying to send a signal through his new year address that relieving poverty would be high on his agenda, then he should take a close look at a report on the expenditure pattern of low-income households just released by the Hong Kong Council of Social Service (HKCSS). If nothing else, it should give him ammunition to argue with civil servants who adopt a very frugal approach in disbursing public funds to the needy, and Chinese officials who feel the departing colonial administration has 'irresponsibly' increased welfare provisions in recent years.

The HKCSS analysis takes a critical look at the 1994-95 household expenditure data collected by the Census and Statistics Department.

This data was used by the Government in 1995 to support its case that payment rates under the Comprehensive Social Security Assistance (CSSA) scheme were adequate to meet the recipients' basic needs.

Officials compared the expenditure pattern of CSSA clients with those in the lowest five per cent income group not receiving public assistance and found that the latter spent even less than the former.

However, social workers argued the comparison was inappropriate because the lowest five per cent income group was in a worse financial condition than CSSA clients.

The Government's counter argument was that even if the CSSA rates were tagged at the lowest 20 per cent income group, they would not have made much difference.

Now, by using a different approach to analyse the household expenditure data, the HKCSS thinks it has come up with fresh arguments that the CSSA rates were inadequate.

Researchers Wong Hung and Chua Hoi-wai found that households in the low-income brackets - 0-5 per cent, 5-10 per cent, 10-15 per cent - spent more on food as their incomes rose, until a point was reached when such spending began to drop.

The presence of such a 'turning point' meant those households whose incomes were below that point would spend every additional dollar they earned on food, suggesting they had suppressed their spending on this critical item.

Mr Wong and Mr Chua considered these households as living in 'abject poverty', because their incomes were not even adequate to cover 'basic and necessary food expenditures'.

They were careful to note, however, that these households were not starving.

Rather, it meant they could not afford to dine out, not in the sense of enjoying a sumptuous meal at a restaurant, but in terms of having a lunch box or a simple meal at a fast food outlet.

They could only buy the most essential staple food for cooking at home. Which brings up the tricky question of how poverty should be defined.

To the Government, the poor should not dine out and the CSSA payments make no provision for it.

But Mr Wong and Mr Chua's case is that for many low-income earners, dining out is not necessarily a luxury. They may well be cage-home dwellers or tenants of small cubicles in overcrowded flats where they are not allowed to cook.

They say the Government's 'basic needs' approach in determining the level of CSSA payments is questionable because it involves subjective judgment of which needs are basic by officials and experts.

They argue that the 'poverty threshold' approach, which uses the turning point of poor households' actual expenditures on food, is more realistic because it reflects the needy's actual needs and expenditure patterns in Hong Kong's social environment.

By this measure, Mr Wong and Mr Chua have estimated that 141,000 households not receiving CSSA payments in 1994-95 were living in 'abject poverty'.

On average, single households in the group spent less than $1,200 on food a month, while households with two or more persons spent less than $1,000 a month per person.

If the 109,461 CSSA client households at the time were included, then 250,000 households, or 15.5 per cent of the total, were in a state of abject poverty.

Experts may have reservations over the way abject poverty has been defined by Mr Wong and Mr Chua, thus rendering support yet again to the Government's case that it is not very useful to define poverty.

But certainly in an affluent society with a per-capita income of US$23,000 (about HK$179,400) in 1995, we should all feel ashamed that some low-income earners could not even afford to buy a $20 lunch box.