How Do We Rank?

Hong Kong hits the tenth anniversary of the handover soon. No doubt the coming months will be rife with talking heads ranking Hong Kong dismally against the rest of the world. It’s begun already: In the past few months, we’ve found out we’re the 88th happiest people in the world (largely because of stress) and the third-to-least sexually satisfied. Think we're that bad? No wonder we didn’t even rank in the top 50 in last year’s Mercer HR Quality of Living survey. But despite the complaints, there are a whole lot of scales we do top.

One thing that crops up in a lot of quality of life surveys is the amount of stress we feel. A study conducted by Dr. Richard Welford at the University of Hong Kong tested randomly selected employees and found that a whopping 75 percent suffer from work-related stress. Sounds terrible, but remember the other side of the story is that Hong Kong’s economy is remarkably successful; and according to University of Hong Kong professor of economics, Dr. Alan Siu, one of the cornerstones of a successful economy is a fulfilled population. “Hong Kong is superior in that respect, as it generates a lot of opportunity to a very diverse group of people,” he says.

Hong Kong also enjoys the greatest degree of economic freedom in the world - information, money and people all flow freely. Of 157 countries, we’ve ranked first in the Wall Street Journal/Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index for the past 13 years. “One dimension of economic freedom is the small role the government plays in the economy,” says Dr. Siu. “Hong Kong’s government spending accounts for only 20 percent of the economy. Larger government spending is problematic as it grabs resources from the private sector and decreases the incentive for the private sector to make money.”

As a result, we’re pretty rich. In fact, Hong Kong has the most Rolls-Royce cars per capita in the world (source: investhk.gov.hk) and is home to the world’s fifth largest community of billionaires (source: ifsl.org.uk). Our GDP per capita at US$36,500 is the world's 14th-highest, ahead of countries like the UK, Japan and Switzerland, and making Hong Kong the wealthiest urban center in China (source: cia.gov).

Of course, many argue we still lack a simple, basic need – clean air. It’s a problem, but “simply, pollution is a byproduct of increased economic activity,” says Dr. Siu. “Actually cleaning up decreases profits, and people may like clean air and clean water, but nobody wants to pay for it.” (That sounds like the prevailing attitude in the government to us.)

But it’s hardly all concrete, transport and particulates; indeed, we actually have the highest ratio of parkland in the world – 40 percent. And anyway, what’s the problem with concrete when it comes this pretty - Hong Kong’s airport won Skytrax’s “Best Airport” award five years running; we only came runner-up to Singapore in 2006 (source: worldairportawards.com).