HK residents keen to leave

HONG Kong people are significantly more dissatisfied with their lives than residents in Shanghai (上海) and Singapore (新加坡), and are prepared to leave the SAR if given the choice.

Think-tank Civic Exchange (思匯) said it interviewed 1,500 people in the three cities for its Asian Urban Wellbeing Indicators (亞洲福祉指標) study from September 2015 to January this year. Shanghai respondents rated their life-satisfaction level at 7.4 points out of 10. Singapore scored 7.1 with Hong Kong a distant third with 5.8 points.

The survey sought to find out what issues caused most concern and what pleases respondents most.

Results show the care-satisfaction gap in Hong Kong is the largest in the quality and cost of housing and the quality of government and education.

About 70 per cent of the Hong Kong respondents feel their city has become worse since they started living here and 42 percent said they would leave if given the opportunity.

Chief executive Maura Wong Hung-hung (王虹虹) said the figures are alarming and that the people’s urge to move away is strongly correlated to the views on liveability for children. Nearly two-thirds of Hongkongers - 66 percent - believe that the city is not a good place in which to bring up children, compared with 16 percent in Shanghai and 13 percent in Singapore.

Wong said: “Our performance in housing and our performance in education are about equally good or equally bad. Our government talks a lot about housing but I don’t think we have talked enough about why people feel Hong Kong is not a good place to bring up children and education has something to do with it.”

(This article is published on Sing Tao Daily on 20 June 2016)

Asian Urban Wellbeing Indicators - Civic Exchange
http://goo.gl/BqBQpt

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