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BY
Kong Hung
04012259
Applied Economics Major
April 2007
1
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Tang Shu Hung.
His invaluable advice and genuine support guided my way in doing research. His
encouragement helped me through hard time. His supervision is very important for
I would also like to thank Dr. Ng Ying Chu for her precious comment and patient
Finally, I would like to thank my classmates for their helping hand and my beloved
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Abstract
The persistence of rising income inequality in Hong Kong has provided
economists a hot topic for debate. During the same time period, Hong Kong
working industry, age and gender. The present study uses Hong Kong 1996 By-
Census and 2001 Census datasets, and the Mincerian equation to estimate the
findings suggest that except working industry, the other three do not completely
support the relevance, which reveal that the link exists but is rather weak.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgement 2
Abstract 3
Table of Contents 4
Chapter 1. Introduction 5
1.1 Widening Income Inequality Trend 5
1.2 Economic Transformation in Hong Kong 6
Chapter 3. Methodology 10
Chapter 5. Results 14
5.1 Empirical Findings 14
5.2 Discussions 17
References 21
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Chapter 1. Introduction
In the past several decades, there are raising concerns on income inequality
internationally. Many studies (see, for example, Tsang, 1993; Lui, 1997) pointed out
that there is increasing income disparity between the rich and the poor in Hong Kong.
A quick glance at the official Gini Coefficient calculated by the Census and Statistics
Department (see Table 1) tells that it has been rising gradually. Especially after the
According to the World Bank (2004), when comparing Gini Coefficient for 127
economies in the world, Hungary (at 0.244), Denmark (at 0.247) and Japan (at 0.249)
rank at the top while Hong Kong (at 0.525) is one of the economies which has the
widest income disparity. Not only is the Gini Coefficient for Hong Kong much higher
than other developed countries but also higher than China (at 0.447). It was more
shocking that its value is close to third-world economies, for instance, Nigeria (at
The summary report of World Development Indicators (The World Bank, 2004)
aroused an urge to explore income inequality in Hong Kong. Income disparity may
affect social stability negatively through increasing crime rate etc. Many researchers
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growth (see, for example, Deininger and Squire, 1998). Ultimately, economic growth
restructuring evidenced in many other developed economies. For instance, Mr. Yam,
the Chief Executive of Hong Kong Monetary Authority, has made a speech in 2003
saying that
"I believe that this development is one reason why the measured distribution of
income in Hong Kong has become more skewed ...... the current process of market-
led structural change in Hong Kong is not something that can be resisted or
reversed. ...... Hong Kong has to cope with it and make the best of it."
following section.
Immediately after the postwar period in the 1950s, other countries imposed an
embargo on commerce with China. This forced Hong Kong to transform from an
entrepot trading center for China into an export oriented light manufacturing center.
The second economic transformation started at 1978 because of China's open door
policy. This allowed the manufacturers to migrate their production base to China, in
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particular to the Pearl River Delta area in Guangdong Province, to enjoy lower labour
cost. Hong Kong, then, transformed to be the management and coordination center
serving the manufacturing base that had moved. At the same time, Hong Kong's
financial sector began to emerge to be one of the important financial centres in the
to the increasing economic dependence among countries through import and export of
goods and services, free flow of capital, and diffusion of information and technology.
Given its impact, Hong Kong is evolving further towards a highly service-oriented
economy that serve as the close trading partner for China with the rest of the world
Table 2 presents the share of the manufacturing and services sectors in total GDP.
From the table, we can see that the share of manufacturing sector diminished
considerably from 21% to 5% from 1981 to 2001. In reverse, the share of services
sector increased sharply from 66% to 84% during the same period. The huge change
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Economic transformation (sectoral shifts) of the Hong Kong economy may affect
elderly and unskilled labour negatively and lead to social problems that range from
and more specifically, widen income inequality. The present study aims at examining
(1) What were the effect of economic transformation on income? (2) In terms, could
Income
Economic transformation of Hong Kong can be summarized as an evolvement
skilled and educated labour. The growing demand for educated labour will raise their
returns relative to labour with low education level. Bartel & Lichtenberg (1987) and
Suen (1995) suggested the reason of discrimination against less educated labour is
that highly educated labour are more adaptable to changes. Their flexibility is
important and thus highly rewarded because rapid change is foreseen around the
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2.2 Effect on Income across Sectors
change in final demand, then, we can expect returns to the expanding (services) sector
will rise relative to returns to the shrinking (manufacturing) sector. On the contrary,
(manufacturing) sector, the reduction in labour supply will raise its returns.
Suen (1995) stated that senior people are less adaptable and less willing to change
people will not be able to cope with the swift change. They have less intention to
leave the shrinking (manufacturing) sector if they are already working in it (i.e.
inadaptable and unwilling to change). On the other hand, younger people are less
willing to enter this sector. Therefore, senior people will suffer from decreasing
By assuming that male and female are equally endowed with mental labour with
the difference that male is endowed with more physical labour than female, Fan & Lui
(1999) and Galor & Weil (1996) found that when an economy transforms from a
gender earning gap. The reason behind is that man may have advantage in physical
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strength to benefit himself when working in a labour-intensive (manufacturing)
(service) industry. Therefore, the returns to female will increase relative to the returns
Chapter 3. Methodology
Mincer (1974) developed a schooling model to estimate returns on the number of
age and gender. This model has been widely used in the subsequent studies. His
model has several variant forms, the one which are applicable to this study is written
as
relevant characteristics that affect income and ε is an error term. This specification
financial or community services), age, age squared, gender (male or female), marital
status (now married or single), and whether the person was born in China or Hong
Kong.
individual so that we expect the coefficients to be positive. The coefficient of the age
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variable should be positive while the coefficient of the age squared variable should be
negative. This is because an individual can accumulate human capital through job
experience with his/her age, thus, the expected signs should be the same as that of
marital status, place of birth and industry that works, will have their own effects on
Throughout this paper, we take monthly income from main employment as the
income measure.
with 26360 observations and 27751 observations respectively. Only employees of age
between 15 and 64 with positive monthly income from the main employment are
included in the analysis. To focus on the local employees as well as to eliminate the
influence of identical income of domestic helpers from abroad, foreigners (i.e. people
not born in Hong Kong or China) were excluded in the sample. Individual workers in
agriculture, fishing, mining and quarrying industries and those industries that are not
The dependent variable in the Mincerian equation used is the natural logarithm of
include education level completed (PRIM, LOWSEC, UPSEC, POSTSEC and UNIV)
with the reference group being people with no education, industry dummy variables
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(CONST, WHOL, TRAN, FIN and SER) with the reference group being the
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1996 2001 (real)
WHOL 0.234 0.249
(0.424) (0.433)
TRAN 0.107 0.108
(0.310) (0.310)
FIN 0.142 0.168
(0.349) (0.374)
COMM 0.161 0.183
(0.367) (0.387)
N 26360 27751
Official Gini Coefficient 0.518 0.525
Note: Standard deviations are in parentheses.
Table 3 provides the sample statistics of the variables by year. The monthly
income from main employment in 2001 sample is adjusted by consumer price index
to obtain the real amount in 1996 dollar. Completed years of schooling increased by
1.2 over the five-year period, while labour market experience remains stable. Take a
closer look into the educational dummy variables would provide the reason for
university level or above had increased dramatically from 2% to 15.9% while the
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The largest decline, from 15.1% to 7%, occurred in the percentage of workers
The gender makeup within the sample is almost equal, with slightly more male
(ranging from 57.5% of the sample are male in 1996 to that of 52.3% in 2001) than
Average age of the sample increased by nearly 1 year, which is consistent with the
growing aging population trend. The percentage of labour who are married or born in
The industry dummy confirms the fact that labour engaged in the manufacturing
industry was declining (from 18.8% to 11.7%) while that in financial, and community
and personal services both rose by about 2%. The average real income increased by
more than $2300 in five years. The standard deviation of average income also go up,
Chapter 5. Results
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1996 2001
Table 4 presents the results of the regression of the earnings model described in
Chapter 3. As expected, education, working industry, gender, marital status, age and
the birth place are important determinants of earnings in Hong Kong since all of them
The adjusted R2 of 0.39 in the 1996 model, indicates that 39 percent of the
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variation in the lnMEARN is explained by the independent variables included in the
model. The explanatory power of the 2001 model is higher with the adjusted R2
reported is 0.456. For both models, the high F-values confirm that the independent
The findings suggest that while completing primary education only provides
around 14% more of income relative to those without education, completing post
100% relative to those with no education. There is an interesting finding that, for both
models, returns to upper secondary education is nearly a double to the returns to lower
secondary education (60.9% : 29.2% for 1996 and 62.7% : 32.7% for 2001). Likewise,
returns to lower secondary education also equal nearly two times of the returns to
primary education (29.2% : 14.3% in 1996 and 32.7% : 13.7% in 2001). The returns
to education level is rather stable in the five-year period, except for labour completed
In line with our expectation, all industries' return enhances corresponding to the
earnings to community services ranks number one in both years, which is 42% and
53% higher than it; financial industry ranks second, which is 38% and 45% higher
than it in 1996 and in 2001 respectively. This implies that the returns to other
industries continue to outpace the returns to manufacturing industry, and with a faster
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Males earn 33% more than females in 1996 and the gender earnings gap enlarged
Married workers continue to earn more than single workers and remain stable at
around 11 – 12%. Similarly, Hong Kong workers keep on to earn about 13% more
From the table, it shows that for every year you grow up, there will be a positive
returns, from 7.3% in 1996 to 9.6% in 2001. Although there is an increase in earnings
5.2 Discussions
equivalent changes in the returns. In other words, the previous findings on deviation
earnings to primary level workers from 14% to 13%, as well as a slight increment of
level workers face a large drop in earnings. Coincide with the conclusions of Suen
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(1995), while its shows some evidence that people with little education are less well-
paid than the others, the link between structural change and broadening earnings gap
against less educated cannot be clearly established. The study of Ng (2001) may bring
us an explanation to the unexpected change for workers that had completed first-
degree or above. She stated that there is an oversupply of postgraduates recently. The
trend will endure and worsen in 2007, according to the Report on Manpower
Projection to 2007. Other things being equal, oversupply would result in reduce in
The empirical results support the first argument of Suen (1995) such that the
expected returns on the expanding (service) sector rise relative to that of the shrinking
industries, thus, may be one of the source of the rising income inequality during
Similar to the findings of Suen (1995) and Ng (2001), it does not show a
from 1996 to 2001 even indicates an improvement on the well being of them. In
contrast, diminishing return to age worsens. These two opposite changes leave the
The gender earnings gap widens by 4 % in the five-year period. In 2001, males
earn 37% more than females, ceteris paribus. Different to the results of the study of
Fan & Lui (1999) and Sung et al. (2001), they all found a narrowing gender earnings
gap during economic transformation. They reasoned their outcome that the rising
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educational attainment of females and transformation of the economy from
who are better paid. Broadening earnings differential between male and female may
6.1 Summary
Given the fact that Hong Kong has been undergoing economic transformation from
income inequality trend, the present study’s purpose is to establish the links between
them.
There are four possible channels that economic transformation can affect income
people's earnings and gender earnings gap. Despite a clear link exists between
gender earnings gap is weak and the link through the rest two channels remains to be
established.
While the results show some evidence between economic transformation and the
increasing income inequality trend, it is difficult to construct a trend from five year
data only.
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The sectoral shifts theory of unemployment holds that periods of accelerated
structural change generate labor market mismatch and increase the extent of frictional
unemployment. Lilien (1892) pointed out the relationship between sectoral shifts and
transformation, displaced workers would find difficulties in finding new jobs, this
rate. It is recommended that the future studies may consider adding unemployment as
an independent variable.
The analysis focuses on employees only, those who are self-employed are not
included. The future studies are recommended to include a broader sense data.
Variables such as the quality of education and parental factors were not
The sample of the analysis has excluded all the foreigners. But in an international
city such as Hong Kong, the results may be biased. Future studies may consider using
other method to exclude the effect of domestic helpers to minimize bias. For example,
1
Industry Code 950 refers to repair services, laundry, dry cleaning and garment
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References
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The World Bank. (2004). 2004 World Development Indicators. Washington, DC:
The World Bank.
Tsang, S.K. (1993). Income Distribution. The Other Hong Kong Report 1993,
Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1993, pp. 361-368
Wong, Y.C. (2002). The Asian Financial Crisis, Economic Recession, and
Structural Change in Hong Kong. Journal of Asian Economics, vol. 13, pp.
623-634
Yam, J. (2003). Income Distribution. Retrieved from
http://www.info.gov.hk/hkma/chi/viewpt/20030206c.htm
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