Social Policy Case Study

Introduction

Social policy, with a variety of definitions, has been part of academic debate among scholars. However, some scholars would emphasized that social policy is an instrument of government projected to promote welfare (Wilding, 2007; Dorwart, 1971). On the contrary, more pessimistically, Catherine Jones (1990) assumed that the objective of social policy is to regulate and manipulate people’s social conditions for governments. Jones noted that social policy as “the involvement of government in systematic attempts to regulate and manipulate social conditions and life chances for sections of a given population” (p. 3–4). When issue keeps on heating, given that, and back to Hong Kong, Wong (2012) concluded that social policies raised

For proof that, as mentioned by Chan (1997), the government tries to avoid taking dominant and active role in providing basic social welfare, in spite of squalid living conditions and poverty were very serious in the 1960s.

Furthermore, and worse yet, not only did the government give a little space in discussing the social welfare, but also more broadly, to set a limit to the redistribution of wealth.

As England and Rear (1981) reviewed what Sir John Cowperwaite, the Financial Secretary of British colonial government in the 1950s to 1960s raised the allegation: “I myself have no doubt . . . social policy tended to appear to many to be more concerned with the creation of wealth than with its distribution. I must confess that there is an element of truth in this . . . my conviction is that the rapid growth of the economy, produces a rapid and substantial redistribution of income” (p. 22).

However, Sir Philip HaddonCave, the Financial Secretary of the colony in the 1970s, further emphasized that the government execute the strategies in economic and social affairs as laissez-faire economic. He asserted that the frustration of market forces will damage the growth rate of the economy. (Hong Kong Government,