Hong Kong Is One of the Most Unequal Territories/Countries in the World

Hong Kong is one of the wealthiest cities in the world. In 2025, the city was home to 154,500 high-net-worth individuals, meaning citizens with a net worth of $1,000,000 USD or more. In other words, about 2% of Hong Kong's population are millionaires.

However, while the media often focus on the number of millionaires and billionaires in the territory, they frequently overlook the number of poor people in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, despite its high concentration of wealthy residents, Hong Kong also has a very large population of those living in poverty.

In fact, Hong Kong consistently ranks among the ten countries and territories with the highest income inequality, with the top 0.001% of the population controlling 55% of the city’s income.

To put Hong Kong's ranking into perspective, it is only preceded by emerging and developing African and South American countries; and ranks far worse than all other developed countries and territories in the world, including cities such as New York and San Francisco.

Overall, while Hong Kong may be home to many billionaires and millionaires, this wealth is solely due to an extremely skewed distribution of income—comparable only to that of some of the poorest countries in the world.