Three interesting surveys have been published recently which go a long way towards explaining why Hong Kong has been so successful as a hub for trade, finance and services.
Yesterday, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (TDC) issued a comprehensive work showing Hong Kong companies are doing more than 50 per cent more in export-linked trading business than government figures are telling us.
If ever there was a compelling argument for the government once-and-for-all to switch its economic data gathering from a gross-domestic-product basis to the more commonly followed gross-national-product basis, this survey is it. The government has begun to switch from GDP to GNP with some historic data, but it appears to be a long, arduous process.
At the end of last year, the United Nations World Investment Report showed Hong Kong was the largest outward foreign direct investor in the region and the fourth largest in the world in 1994 and 1993.
The same survey showed Hong Kong had, out of a top-25 ranking in asset terms, the most transnational corporations in the developing world, led by Hutchison Whampoa.
Then, in the summer last year, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade issued 'Overseas Chinese Business Networks in Asia'. This survey showed that, through a complex web of business relations, overseas Chinese, including those in Hong Kong and Taiwan, represented just 6 per cent of the population of Southeast Asia, yet controlled 70 per cent of its corporate wealth.
It noted that the 50 million ethnic Chinese in East Asia outside China generated a gross domestic product of about US$450 billion - almost as much as China's $500 billion.
