Inside Out | Bleak prospects for Asia, Hong Kong economic recovery amid devastated aviation industry

From the autumnal UK in October to balmy Dubai in November, and now in the northern Philippines until early next year, I have used the past few months to make up for three years of lost contact with closest family and friends. Some call it “revenge travel”, but I prefer to see it as the start of a return to life as it should normally be lived.

If not, we will have lost not just our role as a globally important aviation hub but have inflicted irreversible harm on our entire economy. Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po has laid down markers for recovery, but there can be no underestimating the scale of the challenge and the time that will be needed to restore activities that for decades we simply took for granted.

For an economy of 7.4 million people to lose overnight the stimulus and spending power of more than 60 million visitors a year can neither be underestimated nor easily calculated. It is easy to count the catastrophic collapse in airport arrivals or border crossings, the collapse of the exhibition and trade fair activity, the empty hotel rooms. But what about the restaurant meals not eaten, the retail shopping not done, the taxi journeys not taken?

If I estimate that a quarter of a million jobs were lost in Hong Kong, with a further quarter of a million working people today living on lower incomes, few would contradict me with any confidence, even if I was hard-pressed to prove my arithmetic accurately. It is such numbers that underscore Chan’s prediction that 2022 will see a 3.2 per cent contraction of our economy.

So, when International Air Transport Association (IATA) director general Willie Walsh talks of Hong Kong being “devastated”, he reflects the well-researched view of aviation experts worldwide. “Cathay Pacific is a shadow of its former self,” he said at an aviation conference in Doha in September. “Hong Kong has lost its position as a global hub and will struggle to regain it because other hubs have taken advantage of it.”