HONG KONG SPENDS lots of time and money marketing itself - with questionable results. The latest salvo from Fortune magazine, 'Who needs Hong Kong?', asked predictable questions and offered less than original insights.
For the image-obsessed Government, such constant sniping suggests a lack of presentational prowess. Singapore arguably has far deeper economic problems, yet international magazines continue to churn out glowing accounts of clever technocrats forming flexible responses.
Few doubt Hong Kong has suffered a painful institutional and economic transformation since 1997. The two are interlinked yet the Government's responses have been reactive and ad hoc.
As Fortune concedes, nothing terrible has happened, yet neither has much progress been made. None of Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa's big policy initiatives has delivered substantive results. More worrying is a creep towards intervention to correct a growing list of officially designated 'market failures'.
Yet despite the tough times there are good reasons to believe that dramatic economic restructuring is happening despite - not because of - official coddling.
Such change is centred on Hong Kong's deepening integration with its Pearl River Delta heartland. Hard evidence is found in growing export-based industries, rising productivity and high returns on capital. How much of this wealth is captured inside the SAR and how the spoils are distributed through society remains a divisive issue. Yet the pie is undeniably getting bigger.
