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HKUST Public Policy Bulletin Issue No.7

Private Long-Term Care Insurance in a Super-Aging Society:

A Purchasing Motivation Study in Hong Kong

 

Alex Jingwei HE

 

 

Hong Kong, a rapidly aging society, has been grappling with daunting challenges associated with long-term care (LTC) financing. This problem reflects Hong Kong's very long average life expectancy (as of 2019, 82.2 years for men and 88.1 years for women) and very low fertility rate (1,051 births per 1,000 females in the population). The population of citizens aged 65 and above reached 1.31 million (i.e., 17.6% of the total population) in 2019, with the percentage projected to rise as high as 35.9% by 2069. The elderly population (i.e., those aged 85 years and above) is expected to grow faster than the remaining age cohorts (from 153,000 in 2014 to 724,000 in 2064). The HKSAR government has been contemplating the promotion of private LTC insurance to diversify its financing base.

 

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Author

 

Alex Jingwei HE is Associate Professor in the Division of Public Policy at HKUST. He served previously as Associate Head of the Department of Asian and Policy Studies at EdUHK. Prof. He specializes in public policy analysis, health policy and governance, and comparative social policy, with a particular focus on East Asia. He has published extensively in these areas and was ranked among the top 2% of the world's most-cited scientists in public administration and political science (as measured by his single-year impact in 2021), and in 2020 his research was rated ‘outstanding’ (with four stars) by the international expert panel at UGC's RAE. As a policy scholar, Prof. He is actively engaged in policy advocacy.

 

Further reading

He, Alex Jingwei, et al. "Willingness to Purchase Hypothetical Private Long-Term Care Insurance Plans in a Super-ageing Society: Evidence from Hong Kong. "Journal of Aging & Social Policy (2023): 1 - 2 6 .