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What is the Research Endowment Fund (REF)? How does the Fund work?

  • In the 2008-09 Budget Speech, the Financial Secretary announced that the Government would set up an HK$18 billion Research Endowment Fund (REF) to support research at the UGC-funded institutions.

  • The REF was established in 2009 to provide a steady flow of research funding for the institutions. The UGC is responsible for advising on the policies governing the operation, development and investment of the Fund. Out of the HK$18 billion, the investment income of at least HK$14 billion will be used to replace, from the 2010/11 academic year onwards, the bulk of the existing earmarked research grants distributed annually to the RGC, thus providing greater funding stability and certainty of funding to support institutions' research projects.

  • In addition, the investment income from up to HK$4 billion of the REF will be deployed to support theme-based research, thus allowing the institutions to work on research proposals on themes of a longer-term nature and strategically beneficial to the development of Hong Kong.

  • The REF was topped up by HK$5 billion in 2013/14. Investment income of HK$2 billion is used to replace the government recurrent subvention and investment income of HK$3 billion is used for providing competitive research funding for the local self-financing degree-awarding institutions.

  • In addition, an injection of HK$3 billion was made in 2017/18 to provide non-means tested tuition waiver for all local students enrolled in UGC funded research postgraduate programmes.

  • Pursuant to the acceptance of the recommendations made by the Task Force on Review of Research Policy and Funding, the Government made an injection of HK$20 billion to REF in September 2019, increasing the size of REF to HK$46 billion. The investment income generated from the injection is used for (i) sustaining the level of research funding; (ii) providing funding for the Research Impact Fund launched by the RGC to render continued funding support for impactful research; and (iii) providing additional funding for the RGC to encourage cross-institutional / cross-disciplinary collaborations through its collaborative research funding schemes.