Hong Kong's elderly 'among poorest in developed world'
Close to a third of people aged 65 and over are classified as poor, according to calculations released by the Hong Kong Council of Social Service yesterday.
Hong Kong's elderly are not only the poorest people in the city, they are among the poorest in the developed world.
Among 30 developed economic regions listed in a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report, this is second only to South Korea, where the figure is about 45 per cent.
The figure prompted a fresh call by the council for action on a universal pension scheme.
"We'd like to again urge the government to stop studiously investigating whether a universal pension is needed and take action now," director Christine Fang Meng-sang said.
According to the figures, based on 2012 census statistics, the overall poverty rate - defined as people having equal to or less than half of the median monthly household income - was still the same as 2011, at 17.1 per cent. But the number of people in poverty grew from 1.51 million to 1.61 million . The number of elderly people in poverty grew by 10,000 to 298,000, or 32.6 per cent of the age group.
The poverty rate among people over 65 is 28 per cent in Mexico, 22.4 per cent in the United States, 10.3 per cent in Britain and 1.5 per cent in New Zealand, according to the OECD report.