This study, based on a telephone survey, examines retirement planning behaviors and retirement satisfaction of 1,078 middle-aged respondents in Hong Kong. The findings show that, in general, middle-aged Hong Kong adults do little retirement planning. Retirement planning behaviors focus on a very narrow set of activities, including financial and health planning. Of the 19 planning variables, only a few were significantly related to perception of sufficiency in retirement planning and retirement satisfaction. More important, middle-aged adults in Hong Kong no longer feel that they can depend on their family for support for retirement planning or satisfaction during retirement. The lack of private and public support for retirement planning left the respondents feeling unsure as to whether they have the capability to plan sufficiently for retirement. The discussion concludes with policy implications related to assisting middle-aged individuals in planning for retirement.

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In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, the Hong Kong government introduced welfare reforms to ease the pressure from fiscal challenges and swelling welfare rolls; at the same time, to maintain its development credentials, it made an effort to adhere to its colonial tradition on the provision of welfare. The government adopted various strategies to garner popular support for promoting economic development as the primary goal and for promoting social harmony under the concept of 'helping people to help themselves'. This article examines Hong Kong people's changing perceptions of the condition of social welfare in the past decade. Using a multidimensional developmental welfare approach and data from two opinion surveys conducted in 1997 and 2008, the study finds that Hong Kong people expressed a relatively high level of satisfaction about their own lives, but varying degrees of reservation about the problem of poverty, government provision of social welfare, and opportunities for social mobility. As a result of the sectorally unbalanced welfare reforms, which are biased against the disadvantaged, some of these perceptions have become more negative in recent years. Socially vulnerable people, especially the lower classes, are now more critical of the condition of social welfare, and such feelings seem to be intensifying. It is thus suggested that special attention to the issue of class should be paid in social development programmes to ensure social equality and social justice.

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