the limping messenger

晚安 香港 = Maan On Hong Kong / Good night Hong Kong (maan6 on1; in Cantonese tones, middle rising and high) with an authentic boxman sleeping in the arcade of the Hong Kong Cultural Center in Kowloon and a view from the Peak on Hong Kong Island over Victoria Harbour at Kowloon… taken just before midnight on Tuen Ng festival day in the city with the biggest poor rich divides in Asia.

Hong Kong's rich-poor divide still the world's worst as gulf widens

Hong Kong – Hong Kong’s rich-poor divide has widened, cementing the city’s global top spot for wealth disparity, a news report said Wednesday.

Official statistics published by the South China Morning Post show the city’s top earning families now have an income 25.7 times more than the lowest earning families.

The average monthly income of the top earning 10 per cent of the population was 77,000 Hong Kong dollars (9,900 US dollars) in 2010, up 7,000 Hong Kong dollars or 10 per cent from 2006.

However, the poorest 10 per cent saw their monthly income drop more than 3 per cent to 3,000 Hong Kong dollars, a fall of 100 Hong Kong dollars, according to figures from the Census and Statistics Department.

The middle income group fared slightly better than the poor but not as well as the rich, with their monthly income increasing by 3.3 per cent to 15,500 Hong Kong dollars a month.

Hong Kong’s Gini coefficient now stands at 0.533 compared to 0.518 in 1996, meaning the city still holds the title of having the world’s starkest wealth disparity.

The Gini coefficient measures disparity on a scale of 0 to 1, with zero showing perfect wealth distribution, and 1 maximal inequality.

The United States had a Gini coefficient rating of 0.468 in 2009.

Hong Kong has some of the world’s richest people, with three of its resident billionaires appearing in the top 30 of the Forbes rich list for 2011.

A Run Run Shaw movie of the eighties of last century re-broadcasted a few days ago on the Hong Kong channel of Celestial Movies: "The lights of the city" of a totally poor Mainland China illegal migrant family and their ordeal in surviving in Hong Kong. Misery as burlesque entertainment. Here another 'Good Night Hong Kong' scene of the family going to sleep in two cupboards they found it the street; the kids were promised that one day they would go to "the Peak" and see all the marvellous lights of the city...