The Politics of Welfare Developmentalism in Hong Kong

As an Asian late industrializer, Hong Kong has shared many common characteristics with its counterparts in their welfare system, such as low government spending on welfare, emphasis on self-reliance and the family as informal carers, ideological rejection of welfare as a matter of social right and the primacy given to economic development. The inadequacy of the Asian welfare model was obscured by sustained economic growth, which provided for full employment and rising real wages. In recent years, Asian welfare regimes have confronted a similar set of pressures arising from demographic changes and rising social expectations, with the Asian Financial Crisis representing an unprecedented challenge to their adequacy. In this chapter, I shall examine the development of Hong Kong’s welfare regime after the Asian Financial Crisis, in the light of how the historical path of development, economic globalization and the state of political development have combined to structure the response of the state toward the pressure on its welfare regime.