THE TIME HAS come again for the regular economic report to tell us how much our gross domestic product grew in the first quarter and for several weeks now economists around town have been sucking their pencils to make forecasts.
The closer they are to the world of academia the more that this somewhat academic figure absorbs them, but all economists like to boast of their forecasting prowess if they get it roughly right and to tell you why the figures were anomalous if they do not.
The approved way to do it is to look at all the components of GDP and use other already published statistics to make estimates before putting the pieces together once more and summing them up.
I like doing it the easy way. However different we may think Hong Kong from other countries of the region, the fact is that in economic growth they all go up and down by about the same amount at the same time, particularly if you exclude China and Japan.
It is what I have done in the first chart and I am helped in this exercise by the fact that Hong Kong is always late in reporting GDP. South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia have already reported their first-quarter growth figures and the green line represents the weighted average of these six.
The red line represents Hong Kong's GDP growth and the blue bit on the end is my forecast. It is easily calculated. Push it up by about the same amount that the green line has risen and you get 6.5 per cent year on year, up from 5 per cent in the first quarter. I think it is as good a way of guessing the growth rate as the approved method.
In fact, if anything, I think the announced figure will be higher. The first quarter last year was already affected by Sars and the first quarter this year ended before any slowdown we may have since seen because of worries that interest rates will now rise.