4,682 Hong Kong families will get HK$20,000 baby bonuses in February, senior official says
- Government received the eligible applications between October 25 and January 8, Deputy Chief Secretary Warner Cheuk says
- ‘The purpose [for the incentive] is to let the entire society face up to the long-term problem of falling birth rates and to reverse the deteriorating trend,’ he adds
More than 4,600 families of newborns in Hong Kong will receive one-off HK$20,000 (US$2,600) cash incentives in late February, a senior official has said, while calling on society to reverse the city’s plummeting birth rates.
Deputy Chief Secretary Warner Cheuk Wing-hing on Wednesday revealed that 4,682 eligible applications for the government’s scheme were submitted between October 25 and January 8.
The cash bonus was introduced by Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu in his policy address last year in a bid to boost the city’s falling birth rate.
Hong Kong’s total fertility rate – the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime – has plunged to 0.8, the lowest in the world.
A 40 per cent decline in the number of babies was also registered over four years, going from 52,900 in 2019 to 32,500 in 2022.
“The problem is serious and urgent,” Cheuk said. “The purpose [for the incentive] is to let the entire society face up to the long-term problem of falling birth rates and to reverse the deteriorating trend.
“Some critics doubted the measure’s effectiveness, calling it a stand-alone attempt to ‘turn the tide single-handedly’, but after they understood this is just a part of a series of measures, the social support towards it increased noticeably.”