Brief introduction:

The twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented extension of human longevity around the world. However, the prospects of longer lives have led to concern over their implications for social, financial, health care and retirement systems. With one of the world’s longest life expectancies at birth (88.1 for women, 82.2 for men in 2019), Hong Kong is now ageing faster than many other regions. In this lecture, we present research studies on the effects of longevity on health, disabilities and retirement security. Our findings have influenced the development of reverse mortgages, annuities, voluntary health insurance scheme and long-term care insurance in Hong Kong

About the Speaker:

Prof Chan Wai Sum is Professor of the Department of Finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Previously he taught at the University of Hong Kong, the National University of Singapore and the University of Waterloo (Canada). Wai Sum holds a Ph.D. degree from Temple University (Philadelphia, USA). He is a Chartered Enterprise Risk Analyst (CERA), Fellow of the Society of Actuaries (FSA), Honorary Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (HonFIA) and Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society (FRSS). Dr. Chan’s research interests include actuarial modeling, population ageing and health care financing. He received the SOA Edward A Lew Research Award (second prize) in 2006 and was awarded the Inaugural Teaching Excellence Award by the National University of Singapore in 1992. He has had over 120 scientific articles published in scholarly journals.

Brief introduction:

Despite its relative prosperity, Hong Kong is a rapidly aging society with an exceptionally high poverty rate in old age. Addressing this has become a major priority for policy makers so that the well-being of elderly people can be improved while the burden on public finances can be managed in a sustainable manner. Prof Chou Kee Lee’s research led to more understanding on the limitations of the current official poverty line and provide a more balanced view on the debate on the pros and cons of universal and more targeted pension schemes.

About the Speaker:

Professor Chou Kee Lee is currently Associate Vice President (Research) and Chair Professor of the Social Policy of the Department of Asian and Policy Studies at The Education University of Hong Kong.

Professor Chou was Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration of The University of Hong Kong. He has wide research interests in areas like geriatric psychiatry, elderly policies, population policy especially immigrant policy, poverty, welfare reform, income inequality and health policy. In the past decade, he has published over one hundred papers in international journals, and some of them with a high impact factor more than five.

His research work with older adults in Hong Kong and elsewhere has given him a high profile internationally and he has been ranked in the top one percent of scholars on the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) since 2009. Professor Chou has conducted plenty of policy research projects funded by the Research Grant Council (RGC) and the Central Policy Unit. Currently, he is conducting a five-year study on retirement income protection in Hong Kong funded by the RGC Strategic Public Policy Research Fund and one on the poverty of children living immigrant families funded by RGC Public Policy Research Fund. He was editor of Aging and Mental Health, the section editor of BioMed Central Geriatrics and also a Member of the Editorial Boards of the Asian Pacific Journal of Social Work and Development and Journal of Aging Research.