From Welfare to Workfare: A Historical Institutional Analysis of the Social Assistance Scheme for Unemployment in Hong Kong from 1941 to 2015

Workfare is a policy measure under the umbrella of activation policy with a focus on compelling the unemployed in the social assistance scheme to return to the labour force. In East Asia, Hong Kong was the first place to move from welfare to workfare, introducing the Support for Self-reliance Scheme (SFS) to the Comprehensive Social Security Assistance Scheme (CSSA) in 1999, shortly after the handover of sovereignty to China. However, up until now, there has been insufficient attention paid to this important move. To fill this research gap, this critical realist research adopted a historical institutionalist framework to account for the impact of “causal complexity” on the development of this policy by analysing why, what, and how this move has been embedded in the temporal processes. The whole research is guided by three research questions: 1) What changes have taken place in the social assistance scheme for unemployment from 1941-2015 in Hong Kong? 2) Why did the HKSAR government reform the CSSA Scheme in 1999? 3) What factors have shaped the workfare programmes since 1999?

For research questions 1 and 2, results from the historical institutional analysis showed that welfare development in Hong Kong was bound by the power struggle throughout the reference period. As a result, all changes in the social assistance scheme were limited to “normal policy making” (evolutionary changes), including the move from welfare to workfare in Hong Kong in 1999 since its establishment in 1971. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that Hong Kong was an excellent case (in terms of the move to workfare) to demonstrate how a significant institutional function can be produced by an evolutionary change. As for research question 3, the findings opened the black box of the workfare operations under the New Public Management (NPM) in Hong Kong. More importantly, it discovered the relationship between the management of the principal-agent relationship and the performance of the workfare programmes. In the end, recommendations have been made for improving the design and effectiveness of the workfare scheme in Hong Kong.