PART I INTRODUCTION
5
transport costs. The social stratification of the Island residents is thus intensified by a physical one with the result that those who live there are possibly less frequently confronted by the social and financial gap than are those in Kowloon.
27. In Kowloon, owing to its later development, its flatter topography and its wide straight streets, most of the districts are of easy access to one another, even on foot, and there is not the same marked zoning of the lower and higher income residential areas. Nor is there the same segregation of the business and banking areas from the main shopping and residential areas. These are closer and more interspersed in Kowloon than they are in Hong Kong, which tends to produce a very different atmosphere in the centres of the two cities, particularly at night. In Hong Kong the centre is quiet after dusk, although there is plenty of life and vitality in the outlying lower income residential areas to the east and the west, which also have busy shopping centres. The main axis in Kowloon, Nathan Road, is, on the other hand, full of life and vitality, with people and traffic thronging virtually its entire length until midnight or later. The juxtaposition of lower income residential areas, high class shops which stay open later, many cinemas, restaurants, hotels and places of entertainment gives the street a lively, vibrant, busy, bustling character that is absent, in the evenings, from the central districts of Hong Kong. The lower proportion of government offices and offices of commercial firms as well as the lower ratio of public playgrounds and open spaces in Yau Ma Tei and Mong Kok help to create a greater concentration of people in the brightly lit entertainment and shopping areas in the heart of Kowloon. This is particularly noticeable in the stretch of Nathan Road running north from Jordan Road to beyond Mong Kok. This fine wide street is a natural magnet for anyone seeking the attention of a crowd by means of a street demonstration.
28. The Economy. The growth of Hong Kong's economy rests on the stability of the Colony, its status as a free port and the high standard of protection it affords to person and property, under the rule of law. To these, combined with the administration's policy of minimum interference in industrial and commercial life, the acumen and enterprise of industrialists and managers, both immigrant and locally born, and an intelligent and hard-working labour force, has been attributed its rapid industrial growth in recent years; whilst its development as a centre of banking, insurance and commerce has been outstanding.
29. Growth has been remarkable and the difficulties encountered in the transition from entrepôt to manufacturing centre are now largely forgotten. Exports and re-exports have grown from a figure of $3,210 million in 1956 to $6,530 million in 1965 and the number of tourists visiting the Colony has increased from about 50,000 to 450,000 in the same period.
30. According to available statistics, this growth in the economy has been accompanied by substantial increases in wage rates and relatively small increases. in the cost of living. The Hong Kong Government Salaries Commission reported