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Hong Kong’s competitiveness: No room for complacency

A gist of the blog:

Hong Kong has been crowned as the world's most competitive economy for the second consecutive year, according to the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) World Competitiveness Yearbook 2017. This year, Hong Kong's rankings in "Government efficiency" and "Business efficiency" both stayed at the top position globally, showing that our fine tradition of the rule of law, strong fiscal position, culture of probity, simple and low tax regime, favourable business environment as well as our robust financial system, are well recognised internationally.

However, our ranking in "Economic performance" fell from fifth to 11th, generally reflecting Hong Kong’s moderated overall economic growth in 2016 relative to that of 2015 amid external unsteadiness. As a small, open and externally oriented economy, Hong Kong is under stronger influence of external forces when compared to other economies. The good news is that Hong Kong economy grew notably by 4.3% in real terms in the first quarter of 2017, which was the highest since the second quarter of 2011, in light of improvement of the global economic environment. On the other hand, the high rental cost will undermine our competitiveness. We will continue to increase land supply and we hope that the upcoming housing supply will help address the supply and demand imbalance of the property market.

June 4, 2017