Overcomplexity confuses/deters - HK’s talent schemes should be pruned

Following our comments on improving Hong Kong’s talent attraction regime (see link), the HKSAR government, instead of simplifying and rationalising the existing scheme, has multiplied and complicated the set up into a whole pile of new initiatives which are now overlapping and confusing not only to the casual observer, but probably to the administrators themselves. Let us unravel this massive entanglement in the rest of this article:

Hong Kong has attracted, cumulatively, some 1.36m fresh talent to the city since the handover in 1997 through various schemes; as of 2025 some 55% of approvals granted are still due to the original ‘vanilla’ scheme under the General Employment Policy (GEP, red bar in chart), but the Admission Scheme for Mainland Talent & Professionals scheme (what a mouthful, we will call it ASMTP below, see orange bar) has since taken a second position to have allowed 18% of PRC applicants to enter HK. Although not a permanent entitlement to stay, the then freshly introduced Immigration Arrangements for Non-local Graduates (another mouthful! or IANG below, see green bar) takes third position in total intakes at 14%:

Chart 1: Cumulative approvals for HK’s talent admission schemes since 1997 handover

This apparent achievement however masks a deeper problem: the proliferation of overlapping and increasingly complex schemes may be creating unnecessary confusion for applicants and employers alike, and undermining the original intent of making HK competitive in the global race for talent. We have spent huge amounts of efforts to try and categorise these various schemes, hang on to your seats…

A maze of pathways, but are the even necessary?

Our analysis here has excluded some of the other lower paid labour import schemes and focused on the ‘highly educated’ segments – so no Enhanced Supplementary Labour Scheme (ESLS, totalling 29,255 by mid 2025) or Foreign Domestic Helper Scheme (FDHS, totalling 367,971 by end 2024).

Hong Kong’s talent scheme proliferation is now out of control - instead of two or three clear routes (eg. one for investment, one for talent, and one for labourers), we have now a long list of branded programmes – each with its own acronym, thresholds and marketing slogan – aimed at broadly the same pool of skilled workers. This creates an illusion of ‘innovation’ without expanding the real options available: most applicants still just need a predictable path to live and work, not a menu of near‑duplicate labels. The more schemes are added, the harder it becomes for individuals and employers to understand which channel to use, and the easier it is for government to claim success by launching “new” initiatives. Table 1 summarises the picture of current state of affairs, after we dug deep and summarised from the plethora of definitions and statistics, press releases and legco answers by the government:

Table 1: comprehensive compare and contrast of the various current talent schemes

What do you think? Is this an easy way to attract talent, or does it merely create paperwork and rent-seeking by so called ‘consultants’ who extract economic value from the applicants due to the system’s complexity?

Overlapping Talent Admission Scheme

Instead of blindly opening up new avenues to attract quality migrants, it will help to adopt a more structured approach, by categorising the channels of admission into a small number of key attributes – it is easy to summarise the existing schemes into 5 broad categories intended to attrace:
a) capital – applicants need to invest in HK;
b) expertise – applicants brings needed skills;
c) academic qualifications – applicants need to be good at passing exams;
d) labour in shortage – applicants fill jobs that locals cannot or will not fill;
e) mainlanders – applicants are PRC residents.

The rough overlap of the various schemes are best laid out in the following schematic.

Figure 1: segments intended by the various current admission schemes

It becomes very easy to suggest what to scrap and what to keep as a result of this analysis – any two schemes occupying the same segment should be cut down to just one. Possible abolition possibilities, in no specific order, are:

Expertise (red circle) – given the need for skills is far more important than endless collections of degree qualifications, QMAS should be abolished and just keep TTPS-A;

Labour in need (green circle) – given GEP is tried and tested, and Tech TAS smacks of ambulance chasing when everyone is bullish AI, while ASMTP should not really be given preference to better qualified global talent, these two superfluous schemes should be cancelled, and keeping GEP alone;

Mainlanders (yellow circle) – there is a familial reason to bring HK residents’ children to be reunited, hence ASSG makes sense, but ASMTP is obviously unnecessary when other categories can serve genuine talent needs better;

Academic Qualifications (blue circle) – there is a presumption that higher degrees make for better workforce. This is an attitude that worked perhaps up to 20 years ago, but with more global successful companies turning away from academic qualifications (see Google hiring non-graduates here, with IBM and Apple de-emphasising degrees too, see here, and even accounting firms, see here), and the academia increasingly becoming profit centres and woke factories, not to mention China alone churning out 11m university graduates a year (link), HK can surely do better attracting entrepreneurs instead of exam boffins. As a result, we advocate scrapping this category altogether (IANG, TTPS-b, TTPS-c, QMAS).

Back to basics?

Splitting single logical categories into multiple bureaucratic silos based on some arbitrary civil servant feel good fads is neither efficient nor beneficial to HK’s economy, let alone the local graduates paid for by tax payers whose jobs are now taken by floods of new immigrants. HK’s talent admission framework has also become bloated with institutional redundancy, creating administrative red tape.

Our proposals consolidate the overlapping areas into distinct, non-competing streams is the most sensible way to deal with population policy as well as economic skills matching, with the new lay of the land looking like this:

Figure 2: a simplified admission framework after rationalisation

In fact, we might be able to reduce the complexity even further – the fact that ‘expertise lists’ based admission being a bureaucratic construct means this category can be completely annulled and we stick only to the tried and tested GEP – in other words, imagined shortage of skill never beats actual skills in need, which the economy benefits from introducing.

Chart 2: date of scheme launches and total approvals to date

The author would like to thank Chong Cheuk Yiu from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology majoring in Economics and Finance for assisting in data collection and analysis of this article.