950,000 targeted in new poverty alleviation framework
The government has identified around 950,000 elderly people, single-parent households and subdivided flat tenants for targeted poverty alleviation, in a bid to measure the city's poverty more effectively.  Around 555,000 senior citizens, 213,000 single-parent families and 214,000 people living in subdivided flats are included.  In a Legco paper, the Labour and Welfare Bureau said the move was based on the latest statistics of household characteristics, employment and income conditions. Since 2013, the official measure of poverty has been defined as living in a household with a monthly income below 50 percent of the median. But the bureau said the current measurement may lead to an "overestimation" of the poverty situation in Hong Kong. "Since the 'poverty line' was formulated based on the concept of 'relative poverty', poor households will always exist under 'relative poverty' regardless of the effectiveness of the poverty alleviation work," the paper said.  "This may create the wrong impression to the public that 'more people become poor despite more resources being put in'. These limitations will in the long run weaken the function of the 'poverty line' in monitoring the actual poverty situation." The bureau added that officials will offer help to the three target groups through various poverty alleviation projects, and set key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate the new poverty framework.  Lawmakers are set to discuss the paper during a welfare services panel meeting next Monday. Chan Siu-ming, an assistant professor from City University's department of social and behavioural sciences, said officials should include more people in the exercise.  "Besides those three target groups, there are also other social groups that may be under poverty or they face different social needs. For example, households [who] have children with special educational needs, or [people who are] disabled or with other serious illnesses. So I think targeting those three groups is good but not enough," he told RTHK.  Chan added that the government should improve the current measurement to give a better picture of the city's poverty situation.  "The government can release the statistics about post-intervention. And if the government claim that income is not a very accurate measure, they can supplement it by other surveys, just like counting expenses or housing types. [So] that we can more accurately [calculate] the poverty population."