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Current Affairs

To tackle elderly poverty crisis, Hong Kong needs to rethink retirement

Hong Kong faces the prospect of a tsunami of elderly poverty sweeping over society in the coming decades. The question is what to do about…

By Samantha Johnson / June 28, 2026

Hong Kong faces the prospect of a tsunami of elderly poverty sweeping over society in the coming decades. The question is what to do about it. The good news is that there are ways to reduce the severity of the problem. The bad news is that these will take time to be effective, so we need to start work immediately.

An important sign of the severity of the situation was provided by a recent study jointly conducted by the Hong Kong Retirement Schemes Association and prominent pension consultant WTW. It reported average Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF) balances of a little over HK$300,000 (US$38,300), well short of the millions required to sustain a reasonable standard of living over a long period. The study made several recommendations to encourage people to have more.

It is easy to be cynical about the outcome of studies conducted by or on behalf of those with a vested interest in the outcome. Also, some findings need to be seen in context. For example, the average savings figure will include many people who have only recently started work and have not had time to accumulate greater sums. The average for those on the cusp of retirement would be more relevant, but even allowing for these caveats, the situation looks grim.

The first thing to look at is our assessment of what constitutes a reasonable retirement age. People around the world are living longer, particularly in Hong Kong, which has one of the world’s longest life expectancies. This is a tribute to our collective effort to create a healthy living environment, but it has consequences – which have yet to be fully grasped – for when it is reasonable to expect to stop work.

The study uses 65 as a relevant benchmark, which seems to accord with accepted local opinion, but it is surely time to challenge that assumption. If we are living to 85 or older on average, it is simply not practicable to plan on the basis of 20 years of leisure at the end of a normal working life.

We should be nudging the mindset of both employers and employees towards a retirement age of 70 or even higher. One reason I have been such a strident critic of the decision to lower the qualifying age for the HK$2 transport fare subsidy scheme from 65 to 60 is that it shows the government rowing in the wrong direction.

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