Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen says Hong Kong's economy may have slipped into recession in the third quarter and could face tough times ahead as Europe's debt crisis deepens.
SCMP, Nov. 10
The Hong Kong economy grew by 4.3 per cent in real terms in the third quarter of 2011 over a year earlier.
Gov't announcement, Nov. 11 Well done, Donald. Only two days after you were out there talking doom and gloom your people put out an economic report that says we are still booming. Care for a towel to wipe that egg off your face?
And just what is a head of government doing talking down his own economy in this way? You gave people the impression that you had some advance knowledge of what the third quarter report would show. Clearly you did not. You only showed that you are a pessimist by nature, which is a trait one might look for in a newspaper columnist but not in the chief executive of Hong Kong.
The actual third quarter performance was in many ways even better than that 4.3 per cent growth rate indicated. Take out the contribution from merchandise trade and the year-on-year growth rate was actually 9.85 per cent as the first chart shows.
Nor was it really the much-mooted export slowdown that caused the weaker trade figures. The contribution to gross domestic product from trade is the net of exports over imports and there was a huge surge in imports of retained consumer goods over the last year. This is what made the trade figures a little weaker.