Income and Wealth Inequality in Hong Kong, 1981-2020

June 11, 2026

Seminar

Date : 11 June 2026 (Thursday)
Time : 11:00am- 12:30pm
Format : Hybrid (the Zoom link will be provided before the seminar)
Venue : Room 533, 5/F, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Registration : https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=107002

Abstract:
This paper combines national accounts, household surveys, fiscal data, wealth rankings and election polls, in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of income and wealth inequality in Hong Kong, as well as its impact on political cleavages over the 1981-2020 period. We find a very large rise in wage inequality since 1981, especially since the Handover of Hong Kong to China. Top 1% earners now receive a much larger fraction of the total wage bill than bottom 50% earners, while the opposite was true in pre-Handover Hong Kong. We also observe an enormous increase in the capital share and the top wealth share (normalized by national income) since 2000. Today Hong Kong’s very top wealth share (top 0.001%) is ranked at very top in the world. Finally, we find that the top income earners and high-income professions (such as executives and managers) are more likely to vote for pro-Beijing camp, while the bottom 85% income group, students and lower-income professionals are more likely to be pro-democratic..

About the speaker:
Li Yang / 杨利 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.

Previously, he 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.

His 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 their 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.