Yue Chim Richard Wong 王于漸
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Economic Thoughts on Poverty Alleviation (Part 1)

By YueChim Richard On 2013/05/22 · Add Comment · 102,402 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 22 May 2013) A negative income tax provides a good solution for Hong Kong to address its poverty problem in an efficient and less costly way. It provides immediate political support for government to find breathing space to negotiate difficult-to-reform social programs, and to devise and implement new approaches to funding and organizing social programs that is sustainable in the long run. Long-term political support for alleviating poverty can only be found provided it is economically sustainable.
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Civil Service Pensions and Corruption Deterrence

By YueChim Richard On 2013/05/15 · Add Comment · 8,461 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 15 May 2013) It is appropriate to consider whether the pension scheme should be reintroduced as well. Operating both a staff provident scheme for new staff and a pension scheme for old staff leads to confusion over the purposes of deferred compensation. The deterrence incentive of a deferred compensation scheme is an important disciplinary tool that governments have over their civil servants. It should not be merely a retirement benefit.
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Has Hong Kong Lost Its Magic? (Part Five)

By YueChim Richard On 2013/05/08 · Add Comment · 79,886 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 8 May 2013) Has Hong Kong lost its magic? The old magic kept the economic and social policy agendas delicately balanced through deft political fine-tuning. The new order has tried but we have not found the magic in a political system that is still in transition.
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Has Hong Kong Lost Its Magic? (Part Four)

By YueChim Richard On 2013/05/01 · Add Comment · 74,393 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 1 May 2013) The most obvious and disastrous outcome of these circumstances has been the decision to adopt a system of proportional representation in elections to the legislature. This has created conditions that encourage and foster the fragmentation of representation. An aggregation of public opinion was difficult to begin with it but it has now become an impossible task. Instead of finding a proper balance for a new set of economic and social policy agendas, it produces permanent disagreements among sectional, narrow and self-serving interests that dig in their heels and harden their positions. Society becomes more politically divided over time as disagreements lead to policy stagnation. Unresolved economic and social issues pile up and society becomes more divided not only economically and socially, but also politically.
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Has Hong Kong Lost Its Magic? (Part Three)

By YueChim Richard On 2013/04/24 · 1 Comment · 86,377 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 24 April 2013) Social service providers, interest groups, and political advocacy groups perceived these changes as a threat. They instinctively favored the injection of more public resources in the old MacLehose tradition, and they were deeply suspicious of and hostile to the government’s new proposals to re-engineer service delivery and social organizations. The government’s approach of reengineering the social policy agenda and preserving the balance between the economic and social policy agendas turned out to be incredibly difficult to implement. In the end the government had to aim for compromised and limited goals.
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Has Hong Kong Lost Its Magic? (Part Two)

By YueChim Richard On 2013/04/17 · Add Comment · 9,120 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 17 April 2013) In the area of economic policy the British colonial government was committed to free and open markets, limited government, low taxes, light handed regulation, and respect for private property rights. In the area of social policy it developed a social welfare system in which education, welfare services, health care, housing and other areas were to varying degrees based on the British model of relying on both direct public provision and subsidies to non-profit voluntary organizations. Any excessive aspiration for creating a lavish welfare state was kept in check, not only because it threatened fiscal prudence, but also out of fear it could lead to an appetite for greater participation in political life. . . . The transition to a more open access political system promised under the Basic Law has redrawn the terms of engagement between the social and economic policy arenas. The balance in the tug of war between the economic and social policy agendas has been tilting against the economic agenda; positive non-interventionism is increasingly under attack.
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Has Hong Kong Lost Its Magic? (Part One)

By YueChim Richard On 2013/04/10 · Add Comment · 12,971 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 10 April 2013) The economic opportunity presented to Hong Kong through China’s rise and opening would create dislocation and disruption in our own community. Amidst rising prosperity there would be losers and laggards. These people would not be able to partake in the new opportunities. Their condition would have to be addressed so that it would not present an obstacle to future economic progress, as they gained a stronger political voice under an increasingly more open local political system. Bold and visionary choices would be required to address this situation. The aim would be to achieve three goals: (1) manage continued economic prosperity as an open city through dual integration with both the Chinese economy and the world economy, (2) attain shared prosperity within the community so that populist politics would not become overly divisive, and (3) nurture ever widening opportunities for mutually advantageous cooperation between Hong Kong and the Mainland for “one country, two systems” to have growing vitality.
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Lincoln’s Heresthetics and Moral Principles

By YueChim Richard On 2013/04/03 · Add Comment · 7,534 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 3 April 2013) The economic life of the black people subsequently took a turn for the worse and their political life was not improved. A century had to pass before racial equality and the black vote would be taken up seriously again as a policy concern in America. . . . . The movie Lincoln shows the President at his best not only as a master heresthetician but also as a politician struggling with the enormous moral burden of working out a solution to a colossal and almost impossible challenge.
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The Political Economy of Lincoln’s Heresthetics

By YueChim Richard On 2013/03/27 · Add Comment · 10,035 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 27 March 2013) Rhetoric is thus merely the linguistic expression of heresthetics, with manipulation and misrepresentation revealed in language. Heresthetics cannot be avoided if collective decision-making has to take place given that the common will is a fiction. In modern economic language it is the consequence of the intransitivity of social preferences.
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Lincoln, Heresthetics and the Birth of the Republican Era

By YueChim Richard On 2013/03/20 · Add Comment · 5,628 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 20 March 2013) Rather than focusing on the morality of the slavery issue, Lincoln’s role in American history should be seen in the context of other historical shifts. . . . . In 1860, Lincoln was swept into power in the most momentous election of American history that ended almost 60 years of Democratic dominance over presidential elections. The Republican Party would hence dominate American presidential elections for the next 72 years. . . . . Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment . . . . ushered in the Republican era that laid the foundations for America’s rise to become the greatest economic power in the twentieth century.
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Income, Expenditure, Savings and the Poverty Line

By YueChim Richard On 2013/03/13 · Add Comment · 16,472 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 13 March 2013) We now know that using household income to measure income inequality and define poverty has many flaws. On balance Poverty Line B is preferable to Poverty Line A for one basic reason. Comparing individuals and households of the same age cohort is far more likely to be meaningful because we are comparing households with their peers who are at the same stage of their life cycle, have grown up in the same era, and have the same vintage of schooling. Age is the better choice for anchoring the poverty line.
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Hong Kong’s Construction Industry: Diagnosis and Prognosis

By YueChim Richard On 2013/03/06 · 1 Comment · 85,885 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 6 March 2013) There is reason to be immediately concerned about this. Some of the heaviest construction works for the ten major infrastructure projects will be in full progress this year. A labor shortage due to the low productivity of local construction workers will create a major bottleneck for satisfactory progress in these works. This will add to the burden of completing planned housing construction in future as announced in the Chief Executive’s Policy Address last month. Unless the importation of construction workers is planned to help keep these current and past ambitious projects on deadline, they are unlikely to be completed successfully on time.
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How to Draw a Poverty Line (Part 2)? ––– Using Age as the Anchor

By YueChim Richard On 2013/02/27 · Add Comment · 34,703 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 27 February 2013) In the long term, Hong Kong needs policies that have a good understanding of how poor households are formed and what incentives and interventions can help them exit poverty. Passion has taken society to this stage. If genuine progress is to be made, then cool heads and apolitical analysis is vital, for otherwise, we would have learned nothing from the greatest failure in humankind’s attempt to alleviate poverty – that of America’s Great Society Program.
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How to Draw a Poverty Line (Part 1)

By YueChim Richard On 2013/02/20 · Add Comment · 7,119 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 20 February 2013) Anchoring the poverty line on age provides a fairer yardstick in identifying those who are truly in poverty. It also avoids the arbitrariness inherent in comparing households who are at different points of their household life cycle. Age determines to a large extent household size, but it is not influenced by household size and other factors.
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Is There Sex Discrimination in the Labor Market?

By YueChim Richard On 2013/02/06 · Add Comment · 89,215 views
(This essay was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal on 6 February 2013) We found that in the period 1976-1996 never-married women earned an average of about 12.8% less than never-married men per month. During 1996-2011, their pay differences in monthly earnings had dropped to around -1.4%; representing a narrowing of 11.4%. But given that the estimated -12.8% pay difference is not a large number, the adverse effect of sex discrimination on pay cannot have been very large before 1996. Today we have reached the stage where single women are getting higher pay than men. It is no surprise that more men are staying home. The significance of these developments is unknown and has hardly been studied. What can be concluded is that sex discrimination in the labor market is unimportant today. Given that women still continue to have disrupted careers due to marriage and fertility they will probably still lag behind men in senior positions. But the gap will continue to narrow as marriage and fertility rates continue to fall and women’s education surpass men’s.
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