HK financial chief announces measures to improve livelihood of needy

In order to improve livelihood of the needy and the disadvantaged, five measures involving 20 billion HK dollars (2.58 billion U.S. dollars) has been announced by Hong Kong's financial secretary John Tsang on Wednesday.

Tsang told lawmakers at the city's Legislative Council in his budget speech that together with other measures in this budget, the fiscal stimulus effect on GDP will be 0.7 percentage point.

These measures include reducing salary tax and tax under personal assessment for 2013-14 by 75 percent, reducing profit tax for 2013-14 by 75 percent, waiving rates for the first two quarters of 2014-15 that subject to a ceiling of 1,500 HK dollars per quarter for each rateable property, and paying one month's rent for public housing tenants.

In addition to one-off measures, Tsang also proposed recurrent measures to increase the allowances for maintaining dependent parents or grandparents to alleviate taxpaying providers' burden. About 550,000 taxpayers will be benefited and that will cost the government about 300 million HK dollars a year.

Tsang noted that recurrent and one-off relief measures serve different purposes.Recurrent measures may be deployed for new policies, new services or the enhancement of existing services.

One-off relief measures, on the other hand, aim primarily at helping the public to cope with short-term financial pressure, or as a counter-cyclical measure to preserve economic stability and short-term employment.

"Unlike recurrent measures, one-off measures are necessarily subject to adjustment in light of the economic and financial position of the year," Tsang said. (1 U.S. dollar equals to about 7.76 HK dollars)