新作坊

The Usefulness of the Political Economy Perspective to the Analysis of Social Welfare in Hong Kong-A Case Study of the Retirement Protection Measures

摘要：

This article is intended to demonstrate the usefulness of the political economy perspective to the analysis of the development of social welfare in Hong Kong. This perspective stresses that the development of social welfare in capitalists societies are dominated by the contradictory relationship between social welfare and capitalism – that is that social welfare strengthens capitalism by carrying out functions such as facilitating the reproduction of labour and promoting social stability on the one hand; it weakens capitalism by financially overburdening the government and as a result requiring the government to tax capitalists heavily on the other hand. To meet the objective of this article, two analytical tasks are carried out. The first is to identify two tactics adopted by capitalist governments to respond to the contradictory relationship between social welfare and capitalism – the residual and collaborative. The second is to discuss the retirement protection measuress (note 1) (the Comprehensive Social Security Assistance Scheme and the Mandatory Provident Scheme) as the cases for showing how the Hong Kong government attempts to use the residual and collaborative tactics to reduce the negative effects of social welfare on capitalism, and its difficulties in carrying out these tactics.