A ‘smart’ Hong Kong must first figure out how to bridge its digital divide
- Hong Kong’s poor and lesser educated could be left behind in the digital revolution unless creative ways to involve them are found
Hong Kong should aspire to be a smart city. There are many prerequisites for creating a smart city, one of which is a strong digital economy. The odds are good for Hong Kong, if mainland China’s enthusiasm for adopting e-payment is any indication.
According to McKinsey and PricewaterhouseCoopers, the penetration rate of mobile payments in China has grown from 25 per cent in 2013 to 86 per cent in 2019. Last year, the value of mobile payments in China, in terms of amount consumed, was US$41.51 trillion, 43 times the transaction value of digital payments in the United States.
In a digital economy, there is an ever-increasing need for mobile phones. With 1.58 billion subscribers in the mainland, they link various elements of the smart city. For example, there have been tremendous venture capital investments in big data, artificial intelligence (AI), financial technologies (fintech), virtual reality (VR), autonomous driving, and wearables in China that rival or surpass those in the United States. The products and inventions from these financial injections, totalling more than US$105 billion, are sure to spill over into Hong Kong as it develops into a technologically integrated city with new ways of conducting logistics, city planning, health care, other professional activities and e-commerce.
There are, however, challenges to Hong Kong’s becoming a smart city. One is inclusion; many poor and undereducated Hongkongers do not have access to the technologies like personal computers and smartphones that most take for granted. According to latest census, 80.9 per cent of Hongkongers have a computer at home, and 80.2 per cent of all households have computers that are connected to the internet. So the city cannot be fully dependent on digital devices and communication without a sizeable portion of the city being left out.
No doubt, there exists a digital divide. Only 37.9 per cent of people making less than HK$10,000 per month have a computer at home, and not all are internet-enabled (36.7 per cent). By comparison, 98.9 per cent of those earning more than HK$50,000 per month have a computer and 98.6 per cent of them have computers with internet access. Data also shows that Hongkongers with only a primary education are half as likely to have the basic digital literacy to use a computer. In Hong Kong, education and income are directly correlated – for example, the median salary of a woman with only a primary education is HK$8,300, while a female university graduate has a median salary of HK$15,000.
So the statistics show that undereducated, poorer people are less likely to know how to use a computer. Retirees and the elderly, among whom the poverty rate is 44.4 per cent, have a very low computer usage rate compared to the general population – 44.2 per cent versus 84 per cent.
An important part of Hong Kong’s digital transformation is mobile devices. In the city, 88.6 per cent of residents have smartphones, more than Japan and South Korea. But this hides the fact that low-income residents do not have the same access. The smartphone penetration rate among those with a primary education or below – representing those who, on average, make the least money in the city – was 58.1 per cent in 2018, or around 1.5 times lower than university graduates. Retirees and the elderly have a low penetration rate as well, at 57.6 per cent.
To create a smart city of the future, Hong Kong must nurture a tech-savvy population that is ready to adopt new innovations. But underlying region-leading statistics in how and how much residents are using computers, smartphones and the internet are indications that certain groups – the poor and the undereducated – are not benefiting from new technologies at the same rate. This unequal access to technological gains, already substantial, may accumulate and turn into a social as well as an economic chasm if creative solutions are not found.
Gary Lai was the founder and director for 10 years of the anti-poverty campaign TKO Poverty
