I AM PUZZLED. Will someone help me out? I am told our retail and restaurant industries are suffering from extreme bad times and yet some things just do not seem to add up in this story.
Let's take the retail trade first. The story is that what with the economic downturn, the way that Shenzhen shopping malls are poaching shoppers and the price cutting that retailers have been forced to adopt, the doom and gloom in the business is at its deepest in living memory.
Will someone please tell me in that case why wholesale and retail establishments have added 24,000 people to their payrolls over the past two years? Was this public charity? Did these employers do it, knowing they would lose money, just to help Hong Kong out in hard times?
Will someone also please tell me why these employers not only took on these people out of the kindness of their hearts but then also paid them so richly that in real terms, after adjusting for inflation, their wages have risen by 3.8 per cent a year for the past two years?
In actual fact, that line on real wage growth in the first chart is probably too low. It incorporates restaurant and hotel as well as retail trade workers and what figures are available say that wage growth has been lower in restaurants and hotels. Retail clerks have probably seen their real incomes grow by nearly 5 per cent a year recently.
But the growth rate in retail employment certainly tells a story that is at odds with popular perception. In the second quarter this year the number of new jobs in the industry grew by 6.5 per cent over the same quarter last year.
So what is it that we have here, kind-hearted charity or a vote made by retailers with hard money that things are not really so bad as they would like to portray them to the public and to legislators who never look at a single figure of hard data before they open their mouths to pronounce on what the data shows?
