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NF 13.
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need to prune it increases too. As I have said before, there comes a point where the quantity of information absorbed varies inversely with
the quantity presented. I fear we may have gone past that point already. This is one of the reasons why I still think it would be a good idea to appoint a single editor for all of the budget documents. One thing he should do is to encourage more people to read the important booklets
on the economic background and prospects by removing as much jargon as possible. If technical terms like 'aggregate demand, which I understand has nothing to do with piles of stone, and total final demand which they tell me is not a rude red letter from the Inland Revenue Department
4
though
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if these terms must be used, they should be clearly defined in a glossary. One should not have to search through the footnotes for definitions. There are, in any case, far too many footnotes: five in the first nine
over foc lines of economic background and a total of jane hundred in the two booklets. Yet I have not found anywhere a note about the marging or 7 margins of error in our masses of statistics, here it is clear from the introduction to the GDP Booklet that there is a considerable
margin of error in those statistics. We should be told what are the margins of error and we should also be told which of the calculations are based on actual figures and which are extrapolations from samples.
There is one more important matter of definition for which I am still
waiting. The Financial Secretary says that he is particularly conscious
of the need to give further consideration to the refinement of our consolidated account expenditure. May I say that it is not refinement that we need, just common sense When we all acknowledge that the relationship between public sector spending and the GDP is of prime importance for the economic health of Hong Kong, it is absurd that we still have no satisfactory definition of, and consequently no reliable
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figures for, the size of the public sector.
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Both the present measures, namely the consolidated account expenditure and the national accounts' definition exclude large items that are clearly
in the public sector and that are part of the demands the public sector
makes on the economy. For instance, as I have consolidated
pointed out before,
MTRC and the KCR but
On the other hand,
account expenditure excludes the includes subventions to non-government organisations.