Hold your cheer, as our growth rate sits on a one-legged stool

I WAS AWAY on a holiday in Europe when the latest economic growth rate was announced (lovely weather, thank you, too bad about what you got) but, although this review of the figures is belated, I think there are still some features worth pointing out.

Our economic performance may be driven by the mainland's and, to some extent, by trends in the United States because of our currency link to the US dollar, but the closest match to it is what is happening in other smaller Asian economies.

The first chart shows you how close that match is. The red line represents the year-on-year growth rate of Hong Kong's gross domestic product and the blue line represents the weighted average growth of seven other smaller Asian economies - South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

What these others did in growth rates of recent years is what we did - down with the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, up with the internet bubble of 1999, down with its collapse, up in a brief recovery afterwards, down with the Sars epidemic and up again in a rebound from it. Is our latest figure up from the previous one? It is also the story in smaller Asian economies. You will not find this lock-step relationship with Hong Kong in the mainland's economic growth nor in Japan's, and certainly not in that of the US.

Obviously, it is not the economies of smaller Asian countries that drive Hong Kong's economy, but we clearly march to the same drummer and this is worth noting when we talk about how we sustain our economic performance. When looking for a clue to our prospects, spare a glance for the prospects of our smaller neighbours.

It does not hold true for everything in our economy, however. In one key measure, we are distinctly different. Our growth is much more narrowly based than that of our regional neighbours.