Transcript of FS's media session
Following is a transcript of the media session given by the Financial Secretary, Sir Hamish Macleod, after his luncheon address to the Federation of Hong Kong Industries today (Wednesday):
FS: I have just been delivering a speech which, in essence, is trying to point out that you should not get too alarmed at current economic figures. There are some which are not as good as they were. Obviously, unemployment is one. Inflation is not coming down as fast as we would like either. But the fundamentals: the GDP growth is looking good; the figure out for the first-quarter, 5.9% real increase, is very good; the trade figures are much better than we had expected, our domestic exports in particular. That feeds through into the service sector. So one must not get carried away with the flatter retail sales and assume that economic growth is somehow dramatically declining. It isn't. And that is not only my view, as has been published in the media recently, it is still the view, the broad view, of most of the bank economists and others who publish forecasts. The forecasts are still clustering around five to six per cent GDP growth this year, and also saying that economic growth of that order will continue into next year. So basically, we are still in quite a good position.
And just to focus on unemployment for a moment. Obscured behind the figures. is one rather good figure, and that is that the number employed has been going up much faster recently than in the last few years. I think the figure for the most recent three months was up 3.6 per cent. So we have a peculiar situation where employment is actually going up faster than in the past but the number who are ready to work has been going up even faster than that. And basically, as far as economic growth is concerned, that larger number working is good news and is reasonable grounds for confidence. So that was my main message, to summarise it.
Question: The gap between the poor and the rich is getting wider and wider and wider as all of the newspapers carried the survey results today. What can be done with a view to trying to decrease that gap?