Dr Chou Kee-Lee

Professor Chou Kee-Lee is the Head, Department of Asian and Policy Studies; Associate Dean (Research & Postgraduate Studies) of Faculty of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at The Hong Kong Institute of Education. Formerly Professor Chou served as an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration of the University of Hong Kong.

​He has wide research interests in areas like geriatric psychiatry, elderly policies, population policy especially immigrant policy, poverty, welfare reform, income inequality and health policy. In the past decade, he has published over one hundred papers in international journals, and some of them with a high impact factors more than five. His research work with older adults in Hong Kong and elsewhere has given him a high profile internationally and he has been ranked in the top one percent of scholars on the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) since 2009. Professor Chou has conducted plenty of policy research projects funded by the Research Grant Council (RGC) and the Central Policy Unit.

Currently, he is conducting a five-year study on retirement income protection in Hong Kong funded by the RGC Strategic Public Policy Research Fund and one on the poverty of children living immigrant families funded by RGC Public Policy Research Fund. He is the Associate Editor of Aging and Mental Health, the section editor ofBioMed Central Geriatrics and also a Member of the Editorial Boards of the Asian Pacific Journal of Social Work and Development and Journal of Aging Research.

ABSTRCT
Child Poverty in Hong Kong 

In the past few years, I have been conducting a number of studies on child poverty in Hong Kong and I also prepared a number of research grant proposal on this issue. Therefore, it is timely for me to reflect what data we need in Hong Kong to tackle the problem of child poverty.

First of all, the current official poverty line is not sufficient to provide an adequate situation of child poverty in Hong Kong. We have to develop other measurements using expenditure, the absolute thresholds, material deprivation index, asset-based and opportunity-oriented. Moreover, dynamic poverty must be taken into account.

Secondly, we still need data to clarify the impact of living in poverty on children development in Hong Kong, especially the long-term outcomes. As the field of human neuroscience has matured, it is also time to examine the association of poverty with neural or brain development using neuroimaging technology as well as the interaction between genetic disposition and living in poverty on children development. More importantly, we need to know the mechanisms such as pre-natal factors, parent-offspring interactions and cognitive stimulation, underlying the link so that corresponding intervention could be designed, developed and implemented.

​Thirdly, at the same time, we have to find the most cost-effective intervention so as to minimize the effect of living in poverty on children development. We have to evaluate and decide whether early intervention or teenage intervention, cash or in-kind intervention, person or environment oriented is a more cost-effective measure, especially in long run so that all children no matter what their socio-economic status are, have equal opportunity to succeed. In the presentation, I will describe these three roadmaps on child poverty data.