Social Care in Hong Kong: The Dynamics of the Welfare Mix

Veronica Pearson

Chapter 9 in Transforming the Developmental Welfare State in East Asia, 2005, pp 209-228 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract From the 1970s through to the early 1990s Hong Kong had one of the most vibrant and fast-growing economies in the world. This came to an end in October 1997 with the Asian Financial Crisis, followed by precipitous falls in US stock markets. This also coincided with the reversion of Hong Kong to the sovereignty of the Mainland so that the post-1997 government was beset by problems from the start. Business and political circles (largely coterminous in the last thirty years of Hong Kong’s history) have always been aware of what they saw as the fragility of Hong Kong’s economy (Wilding 1996), knowing that it was dependent ultimately on world economic factors over which Hong Kong had no control. It is in this context that welfare developmentalism has to be analysed. In the case of this chapter, social care will be used as a means to explore three related issues: (a) deciding whether welfare developmentalism has been weak in Hong Kong and linking it to Hong Kong’s unique political and institutional characteristics as a British dependent territory and then a Special Administrative Region (SAR) within Mainland China (b) examining, through the use of a case study of services for the mentally ill in Hong Kong, how responsibility for the provision of social care is negotiated by the state and non-government sector (c) Reflecting on the connection between social care and the legitimation of governance.

Keywords: Social Welfare; Government Printer; Social Care; Vocational Rehabilitation; Asian Financial Crisis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
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DOI: 10.1057/9780230523661_10

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