Elderly will lift HK, not floor it, says bank study
Hong Kong's growing population of elderly people may not be as bad for economic growth as predicted, according to a report by HSBC.
The city's elderly are living longer, but they are also fitter, volunteering more and helping out with their extended families, the report found.
Globally, retirees feel more responsibility to their families and do not miss work or money as much as expected, the bank's third annual Future of Retirement survey, released yesterday in London, said.
The findings should dispel the notion that Hong Kong's very low birth rate and rapidly ageing population pose a big threat to the city's economic growth by sapping resources, the report's authors say.
Demographers have fretted that Hong Kong's low birth rate - 1.1 child per woman - will cause problems for the economy because not enough people will be entering the workforce to support the bulging elderly population. But researchers said that fact should be seen in a different light.
'Our view of retirement is that this generation is the turbo rather than the brake,' said Clive Bannister, group managing director of HSBC Insurance.
The report found that older people are feeling healthier and contributing a lot to the economy. The elderly in Hong Kong contribute HK$1.3 billion a year in salaries tax and undertake voluntary work worth HK$1.5 billion, it said.
Researchers found that 12 per cent of Hong Kong people in their sixties and 7 per cent of those in their seventies do some kind of voluntary work in their communities, spending an average of six hours a week doing so.
The study found the same rate of volunteerism on the mainland but people there spent only 4.8 hours a week on it, while in Taiwan, the time spent dipped to 4.1 hours.
In Hong Kong, one in seven respondents aged 60 to 79 had given some sort of practical support to a friend or relative in the past six months, researchers found.
More than a quarter of people in their seventies said they received such support.
The numbers were lower for the mainland, with a tenth of seventysomethings saying they provided support and 20 per cent saying they received support.
HSBC interviewed 21,000 people, mainly urban residents, aged 40 to 79 in 21 developed and so-called transitional economies including the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea for the survey.
