Public service reinvents itself in an exciting decade of change
HONGKONG POST THIS year celebrates a decade of operating as a trading fund, and it does so knowing it has climbed out of a five-year deficit and paid back to the government the $2.1 billion in seed money it received in 1995.
A trading fund is a self-financing government department managed autonomously like a commercial venture, even though the state continues to own it. Hongkong Post is one of six branches of government that have been converted into trading funds since 1993.
The aim of the change was to improve the quality of service and make the government more responsive to the market dynamics affecting its operations. Today there are five trading funds in operation, after the Sewage Services Trading Fund closed in 1998.
Arguably, no other government department has had more to benefit from the flexibility offered by the trading fund model than the postal service. Traditional communication in the form of penned letters and hand-delivered correspondence seems almost old-fashioned in this era of electronic mail, and it was time the organisation unshackled itself from the rest of the civil service to keep up with the march of technology.
'We have survived - and in many ways prospered,' postmaster-general Allan Chiang said.