HKU POP SITE releases the latest results on people's expectation of the sixth policy address of CE Tung Chee-hwa, their satisfaction with his five policy addresses in the past, and with his policy directionBack

The Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong today releases on schedule via the "HKU POP SITE" (http://hkupop.pori.hk) the latest results on people's expectation of the sixth policy address of CE Tung Chee-hwa, their satisfaction with his five policy addresses in the past, and with his policy direction. The last two items are released for the first time. POP's normal practice is to release the results of our regular surveys every Tuesday at 2 pm via our POP Site, except during public holidays, each time with a forecast of the items to be released in the forthcoming week. We will review and adjust this operation regularly.

According to this schedule, the date and time of our next release will be December 24, 2002, Tuesday, at 2 pm, the latest rating of CE Tung Chee-hwa, people's satisfaction with the HKSAR Government, as well as their trust in the HKSAR and Beijing Central Governments, will be released. We will also release the latest findings on people's confidence in Hong Kong's future, China's future, and "one country, two systems".

According to the latest (December 2-6) figures released today, as regards people's expectation of CE Tung Chee-hwa's sixth policy address to be announced in early January 2003, 44% of the respondents wished he would take "economic development" as his first priority, which is a record high. Another 29% chose "labour and employment", giving a total of 73% when combined with the first item. Compared with the results obtained in a similar survey conducted in October 2001, "economic development" and "labour and employment" have remained to be two overwhelming areas of concern. "Housing" has obviously declined in priority, it even ranked behind "social welfare" this year.

Regarding people's satisfaction with CE's last policy address, the latest figures registered in mid-September (September 12-17) indicated that 34% of the respondents were dissatisfied, 12% were satisfied, 28% said "half-half", while 27% did not give a definite answer. Because CE has postponed the announcement of his sixth policy address this year, these figures are also the last ones in our series. On a macro level (please see the chart with monthly average figures for the past five years), the satisfaction figure has decreased from a relatively high level of 45% registered soon after CE announced his first policy address in October 1997, to the narrow gap between 10% to 20% recorded in recent years. These figures were normally stimulated to short-term rises after policy addresses and budget talks, and dropped back soon.

Because people's impression of the policy addresses would be blurred as their memory faded, our POP Team has constructed another indicator to measure people's satisfaction with CE's "policy direction". Our latest figures registered in mid-November (November 13-20) showed that 43% of the respondents were dissatisfied with CE's policy direction, 14% were satisfied, 29% said "half-half", while 14% did not give a definite answer. On a macro level (please see the relevant charts with per-poll figures, half-yearly averages, monthly averages, as well as averages per policy year), the satisfaction figure has decreased from the peak of 39% registered in September 1997, down to the level of around 10% to 15% recorded in recent months, and kept fluctuating at the low end.

All new surveys reported in the POP Site today are random telephone surveys conducted by interviewers, targeting at Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong of age 18 or above. The sample size of all surveys is over 1,000 respondents. At 95% confidence level, the sampling error of all percentages is less than plus/minus 3 percentage points. That means if we were to repeat a certain survey 100 times, using the same questions each time but with different random samples, we would expect 95 times getting a figure within the error margins specified. Shall anyone have any question regarding the research design of the surveys published in the POP Site, members of the POP Team will be happy to answer them, but we will not comment on the findings at this stage. Such an arrangement would be reviewed when more resources are available. Please note that Dr CHUNG Ting-yiu Robert, Director of Public Opinion Programme, is solely responsible for the work published in the POP Site, which does not represent the stand of the University of Hong Kong.