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Outside In | ‘Happy Hong Kong’ budget shows city is spared many of world’s most pressing problems
- The most striking feature of the latest Hong Kong budget is the simplicity of the challenges our economy faces and our good fortune in being unburdened by almost any of the budgetary challenges facing so many economies worldwide
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If there is a single striking feature of Finance Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po’s budget released this week, it is not hand-wringing over the merits of consumption vouchers, whether stamp duty changes will make it easier to buy a house or even whether the budget will create a “Happy Hong Kong”.
Rather, it is the extraordinary simplicity of the challenges our economy faces and our good fortune in being unburdened by almost any of the extraordinary budgetary challenges facing so many economies worldwide.
I do not intend to make light of the hardship created by the Covid-19 pandemic, though I really wish Chan would be more transparent in disaggregating the extraordinary costs linked with our quarantine infrastructure, vaccines and testing regimes.
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I also do not wish to downplay the catastrophic collapse of tourism, conventions, exhibitions and the hospitality industry resulting from the hermetic sealing off of our economy from the rest of the world.
Neither do I make light of the time it is likely to take to rebuild businesses, recover livelihoods and return to the levels of economic activity we took for granted back in 2018.
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There is some hand-wringing about the unusual pain of a HK$139.8 billion (US$17.8 billion) budget deficit for 2022-23 and of a fall in the city’s fiscal reserves to HK$817.3 billion, but this burden is light and likely to be transitory on a five-year time frame compared with almost any other economy in the world.
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