The convenor of the Executive Council, C.Y. Leung, disagrees with an analysis of our property market recently published in this newspaper.
The analysis by Stephen Brown, research head of Kim Eng Securities, was sharply critical of the lease premium system, the Government's biggest single source of revenue.
In a letter to the editor, Mr Leung, an estate agent, took exception to Mr Brown's use of the word 'tax' to describe these premiums and argued that the system had worked well for Hong Kong.
Let's dispense with this tax question first. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines tax as 'a contribution to state revenue compulsorily levied on individuals, property or business'.
Satisfied, Mr Leung? And now to this matter of whether it has worked well for Hong Kong. The first chart shows what several Asian economies have built in all forms of property in 1998 in terms of square metres completed per million US dollars of gross domestic product that year.
Yes, you're right, that's us on the bottom there, far below all the others. For every US dollar of goods and services it produced, the mainland built 32 times as much floor area as we did, while Singapore, our most comparable economy, built 9.4 times as much. The nearest to us on the chart, Japan, built 3.3 times as much.
You may now say 'Wow!' or any other exclamation of your choice. Although we are already the most desperately squeezed-in society of all of Asia we are doing by far the least of any Asian society to solve the problem.
