Absence of party politics blamed for what academic calls myopic decisions
Government policies on land, technology and education were at the heart of a catalogue of failures spanning 40 years, Lingnan University president Edward Chen Kwan-yiu said yesterday.
He also said the absence of party politics was to blame for short-sightedness in policymaking.
The professor, who became chairman of the Heads of Universities Committee last month, said there were three major policy failures in the past 30 to 40 years: an overdependence on land, the underdevelopment of technology and a broad failure in education.
'We are overdependent on land - physically, psychologically and emotionally,' he told a University of Hong Kong Arts Alumni Association lunch. 'Directly or indirectly, the rough estimate is that over 80 per cent of our government revenue is related to land.'
He said Hong Kong's competitiveness had declined because it had opted for low-tech service industries due to the lack of a technological base, after a long period in which a view prevailed that the city was too small to develop its own technology.