Coleman McCormick

🇭🇰 Hong Kong Is Fast Becoming an Also Ran →

January 6, 2020 • #

I don’t follow international markets closely enough to keep up with this, but interesting to see this take on Hong Kong’s relative stagnation in recent years, especially as compared to other nearby mainland China cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou:

Despite the transformation the global economy has undergone, Hong Kong’s business landscape remains largely unchanged – the preserve of a small body of property developers and conglomerates, most of them tycoon-owned, who rose to prominence long before the handover. Indeed, one of the most striking things of the city’s history for nearly three decades has been its failure to produce a single major new business.

Responsibility can be attributed to the Basic Law, the mini-constitution that has guided Hong Kong’s governance since its return to China. Passed by China’s parliament seven years before the handover, it came with a built-in bias aimed at preserving Hong Kong’s late-colonial features: a low-tax, capitalist economy, externally very open but domestically protectionist, and overseen by an executive-led government with little formal accountability.

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