f
off-airport activities (forwarders, travel agents,
shopping, restaurants).
hotels,
Apart from these, there are wider
unquantifiable economic losses arising from lost business
opportunities and damage to Hong Kong's image as an
international trade, finance and commercial centre. Neither of
consultants who examined the disbenefits
the two groups of
issue, were able to
put a number on the
disbenefits.
unquantifiable
Put simply, the PADS
consultants produced
figures for
quantifiable
particularly
unreasonably low
disbenefits because they used one
unreasonable assumption. They assumed that very
high airport charges and other restraints could be applied to
scale down the level of demand at Kai Tak. The increased
revenue from these punitively high charges would, they assumed,
to
a large extent, offset the quantifiable disbenefits
arising from saturation at Kai Tak.
otherwise
assumption
Such an
regarding charges is totally unrealistic. Given
that the operations of the air service industry are bound by
international agreements, the extent to which airport charges
and air fares can be adjusted upwards unilaterally for the mere
purpose of curtailing growth in demand is rather limited.