Sustainable economy key to HK's future

Economic expert urges the SAR government to focus on land, education and technology investment for creating a sustainable and diversified economy that can reduce social division. Oswald Chan reports from Hong Kong.

Hong Kong should discard the orthodox belief in laissez-faire economies and create an economic model that focuses on building affordable housing, provides diversified job opportunities, and utilizes technologies to revolutionize traditional industries.

This is the advice of Chandran Nair, founder and CEO of the Global Institute For Tomorrow — a Hong Kong-based think tank focusing on economic, political and social issues from an Asian perspective.

Hong Kong is a great international finance center, but it also becomes the city's problem in itself because Hong Kong essentially has not created a diversified economy. Financial services and real estate are the two dominant pillars of the local economy, whereas these two industries usually generate most of the high-paying jobs.

This economic model, in Nair's view, creates social division, with vast wealth accumulation among certain quarters of the population in the speculative property market, while the number of Hong Kong people living in subdivided apartments has risen and the waiting time for public rental housing also has gone up. Many believe Hong Kong's next generation will always be essentially left with a poor quality of life.

Nair is a Malaysian businessman with a chemical and environmental engineering background. Besides establishing the Global Institute For Tomorrow, he is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council for Sustainability, advocating radical reform of the current economic model and strict limits on consumption.

To build a sustainable economy in Hong Kong, the city's leadership must invest in land, education and technology, Nair said. Hong Kong needs strong government policies in these three aspects, he said.

Regarding land, Nair said the special administrative region government should understand that providing affordable housing is paramount in ensuring social protection.

"The idea that we don't have land is nonsense and it has been proven we have. You have to essentially go and break up certain established rules and spend some money. That is essentially the role of the government," Nair said.

He envisaged "every Hong Kong person will have the equivalent of a Singaporean Housing and Development Board flat — the Singaporean version of subsidized housing in Hong Kong.