Widening of a Poverty Gap: A Condition of Governance Crisis in Hong Kong

Abstract

Hong Kong as a free society, where capitalistic economy is essentially adopted, has failed to balance the distribution of resources and led to the widening of income disparity, indicated by a Gini coefficient of over 0.53 (Ma, 2011) as well as the stagnation of median household income of $18,000 across 10 years (The World Bank, 2012) . The problem of poverty and income inequality had been increasingly felt by the citizens (Wong, Wan, & Law, 2010) which severs the stability and legitimacy of the Hong Kong Government’s rule which hinges on the materialistic benefit for the whole citizenship (Ma, 2011) . The unchangeable fate of poverty as well as the increasing pursuit of social justice (as indicated by an increase of keywords such as “Corporate social responsibility”: 6 occurrences in 2001; 522 in 2010) leads to the emergence of scepticism and grievances against the privileged rich (as indicated by an increase of keywords such as “Hate-rich”: 0 in 2001; 1257 in 2010). Failure to identify the social confrontation and to exert the Government’s role of resource redistribution will lead to governance crisis (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, 1978) . Hence, the manager requires indication tools to assess the situation (Holzer & Kloby, 2005) . A quantifiable social indicator of media coverage (Bengston & Fan, 1999) is required to evaluate objectively the qualitative social tension.