CE says push to attract skilled workers will continue
Chief Executive John Lee on Saturday said the government will not relax its efforts to attract skilled workers, although he said it had already surpassed the target for the year. Speaking on an RTHK radio programme, Lee said 60,000 applications had already been approved under the talent importation scheme over a six month period, surpassing the yearly target of 35,000. He said officials would keep up their work. "The whole world is scrambling for talent. I believe all countries will keep rolling out measures to do so. So we also have to keep implementing new policies to ensure there's enough talent and manpower for Hong Kong's overall development," he said. "I've asked every bureau and department to see what to do according to the actual circumstances... We'll continue to have new measures to make sure we're attractive [to talent]." Lee said the shrinking population was a "structural problem", but the rate of decline will slow down in the second half of the year. He said the administration was also working on ways to boost the birth rate. "Many foreign countries use economic policies to help, but studies have shown that may not be as effective as one would think... We need to look into how many ways to go about this and we're mainly listening to people's views at this stage." Meanwhile, the CE said he was happy with the administration's work on achieving the key performance indices, or KPIs, he put forward in his Policy Address last year. "With KPIs there are clearer goals. I think last year my colleagues had been more responsive and able to focus on the public's needs, and that they had been working with a result-oriented mindset." He said he hoped to announce how they were doing in terms of achieving KPI targets every year, adding there could be disciplinary consequences for officials if they failed to meet them. But he said KPIs were not everything and there were many other tasks for the administration to do that could not be quantified by such targets.