42.
VI: POWERS AND POLICIES
Financial powers and economic policies
Particularly significant provisions of the Joint Declaration as regards the high degree of autonomy to be accorded to the SAR were the statements in Sections V and VI of Annex I that the SAR "shall deal on its own with financial matters, including disposing of its financial resources and drawing up its budgets.." and that it "shall decide its economic and trade policies on its own. Not only does the Basic Law fail to reflect the provision that the drawing up of the budget is a matter for the SAR on its own, or to include a statement of its power to decide on its own its economic, as distinct from its trade, policies, but it has substituted for those powers prescriptive policies which are capable of giving rise to justiciable issues.
43. These departures from the Joint Declaration were · apparent in the first drafts of the Basic Law which became public in August 1987[68].
"The budget of the Hong Kong SAR shall be basically balanced. The growth rate of the estimated expenditure and revenue shall not, in principle, exceed the growth rate of the GDP" and "The Hong Kong SAR shall continue to practise a low tax policy".
It was generally recognised that these departures had their origin in Hong Kong members of the BLDC[69] but, despite representations to the mainland members that these were policy provisions which should not be written in the Basic policy 781 Law
and widespread criticism, the most that the Chinese were prepared to do was to modify the language, to make it as they said more "flexible'. The present text of the two provisions is as follows:
44