Jake's View | Pay day in Hong Kong actually means you are paid
Nonsense survey from Demographia about affordability seriously flawed
Hong Kong has kept its ranking as the world’s least affordable urban centre to buy a home for the seventh year running, in a survey that ... blah, blah, blah...
- SCMP, January 24
Yes, blah, blah, blah, I call it. I think this International Housing Affordability Survey by Demographia, an American think tank headed by a man who favours cars over trains (imagine it in Hong Kong), has some serious holes in its assessment of housing affordability here.
The survey is based on comparing household median income to median home prices and I have trouble with both sides of this equation.
For starters, how does anyone determine median income in Hong Kong? It’s relatively easy in countries with extensive tax regimes that cover all forms of income and thus require that extensive records be kept.
But the income tax in Hong Kong is only a salaries tax and this at a low standard rate of 15 per cent with a host of permissible deductions that allow most people to pay no tax at all. There is no dividend tax, no interest income tax, no capital gains tax, no sales tax and I’ll soon run out of breath if I go on listing all the taxes we don’t pay and other unfortunates do.