How can poverty be understood in an affluent society? This thesis comprises three essays that discuss what poverty is and what policies are for mitigating working and non-working poverty in Hong Kong SAR, China. It takes advantage of city-wide representative longitudinal household survey data from the Hong Kong Panel Study of Social Dynamics. The first essay proposes a fresh approach to measure comprehensive poverty, which combines concepts of relative income, material deprivation, and social exclusion and employs the Poisson-based threshold within the framework of multidimensional poverty index. Hong Kong’s poverty rate under the definition of comprehensive poverty is approximately 7%. The second essay estimates the effects of introducing a statutory minimum wage (SMW) using th...[ Read more ]

How can poverty be understood in an affluent society? This thesis comprises three essays that discuss what poverty is and what policies are for mitigating working and non-working poverty in Hong Kong SAR, China. It takes advantage of city-wide representative longitudinal household survey data from the Hong Kong Panel Study of Social Dynamics. The first essay proposes a fresh approach to measure comprehensive poverty, which combines concepts of relative income, material deprivation, and social exclusion and employs the Poisson-based threshold within the framework of multidimensional poverty index. Hong Kong’s poverty rate under the definition of comprehensive poverty is approximately 7%. The second essay estimates the effects of introducing a statutory minimum wage (SMW) using the difference-in-differences method with fixed effects. It reveals that SMW increases the income of low-paid employees and their households and decreases their poverty incidence. The third essay focuses on the psychological effect of social assistance. It combines the propensity score matching method and the fixed-effects model, investigates the causal relationship between welfare participation and mental health, and finds that the recipients of Comprehensive Social Security Assistance are more depressed than non-recipients, echoing the effect of welfare stigma. This thesis provides policy implications for poverty alleviation in Hong Kong and sheds new light on literature about poverty measurements and policies.