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scale that existed until the public would tolerate it no longer and then compensation packages that have become among the highest in the world. It may come as somewhat of a surprise, then, that Hong Kong’s relatively autonomous civil service has adopted practices that have transformed it into a meritocratic and politically neutral service that enjoys relatively high prestige. The interest of Hong Kong’s political executive in developing a kind of performance-based legitimacy goes a long way toward explaining the transformation.

16.2 Structure of the Public Sector

Hong Kong’s political executive has struggled to control and hold to account both the civil service in government departments and the vast array of public bodies that help to implement public policy.

The public sector in Hong Kong consists of core government, hybrid organizations, state-owned enterprises, and private companies that deliver public services (see Scott, 2005). Public expenditure in Hong Kong is about 18% of GDP and personnel-related expenses for both the civil service and the large public sector beyond core government (see below) account for about 70% of government recurrent expenditure.

16.2.1 Core Government

Core government, mostly tax financed, is composed of 12 policy and resource bureaus, which are charged with making government policy, and 61 or so departments and agencies, supervised by the bureaus, which behave more like executive agencies in the United Kingdom and are charged with implementing government policy. This arrangement separates policy formulation and implementation in most areas and dates from 1973 when the government reorganized the colonial secretariat. The three key principal officials (chief secretary for administration, financial secretary, and secretary for justice), all political appointees since 2002, oversee the bureaus. The policy secretaries, who head the 12 bureaus are also (since 2002) political appointees and, although like all principal officials are appointed by the central government, serve at the pleasure of the chief executive. Policy secretaries are appointed in their own capacity and come to office without any organized political (e.g., party) support. Although by 2008 most of them were retired civil servants, a minority have come from business, the media, and academia. They have not been supported by politically appointed staff, political parties, or think tanks, as might be the case in developed democracies; consequently, they are heavily dependent on the civil service.2

The bureaus and government departments and agencies are mostly staffed by civil servants. The permanent secretary, the most senior civil servant in each bureau, is the budget holder or controlling officer for programs (and thus clusters of departments) managed by the bureau. The heads of the 61 departments and agencies under the bureaus are civil servants and they bid for resources and submit spending plans to their respective controlling officers. A head of department may report to more than one permanent secretary depending on the programs involved. Thus, the head of the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department bids for funds for food safety from the Health and Food Bureau and for conservation from the Development Bureau. Five departments and agencies (Companies Registry, Land Registry, Office of the Telecommunications Authority, Hong Kong

2The government provided further political support for Policy Secretaries in 2008. Most Secretaries since then are supported by a politically-appointed Under Secretary and at least one political assistant. Arguably these changes strengthened the political executive’s control of the civil service.

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and tunnel operators who, although publicly listed private companies, operate under various schemes of control that require government approval to increase tariffs and which in some cases (e.g., electric power) limits profits to a return on fi xed assets. Many of these companies have received fi xed-term licenses to operate on a franchise or monopoly basis. Most schools in Hong Kong are provided by private operators (often churches) and are governed by various regulations that limit fees, impose various qualifications on management, and lay down various performance standards. Their employees are also not civil servants.

Hong Kong has adopted a wide array of institutions to deliver public services. The trend has been toward moving away from traditional bureau-type agencies toward more hybrids that allow greater flexibility while attempting to ensure accountability. These changes have seen the number of civil service posts shrink from a high of 190,000 in 1990 to about 160,000 in 2008. Hong Kong’s civil servants do not include most teachers, who work in the state-subsidized private school system, nor most medical personnel, now employed by the HA.

The civil service is dominated by an elite 600 or so, strong generalist Administrative Service, recruited from among university graduates to staff positions in the policy bureaus and to lead many government departments (see Burns, 2004). The Administrative Service makes up about one-fifth of the civil service directorate (the rest is made up of professional or departmental grades officers such as engineers, surveyors, lawyers, and so forth). The directorate numbers about 1000 positions or about 1% of the total civil service. Below the directorate, another 3,000 or so senior managers and professionals supervise a further 33,000 junior and middle managers. The largest departments are the police (a legacy of Hong Kong’s colonial past, employing about 32,200), Food and Environmental Hygiene (11,000), Housing (employing more than 7,000 in Hong Kong’s huge public housing program), and Leisure and Cultural Services (7,000) (Civil Service Bureau, 2007). Women make up about one-third of the civil service, but hold disproportionately more lowerranking positions on the Master Pay Scale (clerks and secretaries) and the blue-collar workforce. As more women have graduated from university (since 1996 more girls than boys are enrolled in Hong Kong’s tertiary institutions), the government has employed more women than men in the elite Administrative Service and women now make up about 55% of the administrative officer (AO) grade.

Research from the 1980s indicates that the public then accorded the bureaucracy considerable respect (Lau, 1982, 157). More recent studies reach similar conclusions (see Table 16.1). Only the occupations of doctor and teacher in a 2004 survey were perceived as more prestigious. Surveys of trust in various occupation groups, which may be considered as a proxy for prestige, come to broadly similar conclusions. According to a 2001 survey, people trust civil servants more than businessmen, but less than politicians (Lau, 2003, 61). (The survey of prestige, however, indicates no statistically significant difference between the levels of prestige of civil servants and politicians.) Both surveys reveal that people perceive the civil service as a job category to be both more prestigious and more trusted than businessmen. Because of the relatively high regard with which the civil service is held in Hong Kong, the government should be able to attract talented people. The professions, however, probably attract “the best and brightest.”3

3In a study of confidence in various political institutions, Hong Kong’s senior civil servants did not score very highly. Respondents had more confidence in directly elected politicians than in senior civil servants. Still, respondents had more confidence in senior civil servants than they did in the chief executive and his political appointees (see Chan and Chan, 2006).

©2011 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC