Abstract

This seminar shares the research findings of a paper that combines national accounts, census data, fiscal data, and Rich Lists to analyse income and wealth inequality in Hong Kong (1981–2021). A large rise in wage inequality, especially from 1981 to 2001, was found. By 2016, the top 1% of earners received a larger share of total wages than the bottom 50%, reversing the situation in pre-Handover Hong Kong. Since 2000, the capital share and top wealth share (normalised by national income) have increased enormously. Today, Hong Kong’s top 0.001% wealth share exceeds that of all other economies, even surpassing Russia, which is notorious for its oligarch-driven wealth concentration.

About the Speaker

Dr. Li Yang is an Advanced Researcher at ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research. He is also a research fellow of the World Inequality Lab at The Paris School of Economics. He is currently the Visiting Research Associate of Department of Social Work and Social Administration of The University of Hong Kong. Previously, Dr. Yang was a researcher in the World Bank DEC research group in Washington D.C. from 2013 to 2017, a Marie Curie research fellow at Paris School of Economics from 2018 to 2020. He was also the coordinator for East and South Asia at the World Inequality Lab from 2018 to 2021.

Dr. Yang’s main research interests pertain to income and wealth inequality, economic history and political economy. His research output has been published in leading scientific journals in both economics and sociology such as American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of Public Economics, World Development, the World Bank Economic Review, European Journal of Political Economy and the British Journal of Sociology. Owing to the relevance for ongoing public debates, his findings have also widely been discussed in diverse media outlets, such as the Economist, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, etc. Dr. Yang received his PhD in Economics in 2019 from Xiamen University, China.