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you may regard it as itself a statement about Hong Kong, that this is understandably such a live social issue in Hong Kong. Unemployment has climbed to 3.5 per cent.
The principal reason for the increase in unemployment in Hong Kong is that the size of our workforce over the last year has increased by 4.3 per cent and we have only created slightly under 3 per cent more jobs. Why has the size of our workforce increased? One reason is emigrants to Canada, to Australia and elsewhere, who have been returning to Hong Kong to resume their lives and to resume their careers in the community where they were born or in which they lived for many years.
We still attract many foreign nationals, who come to work in Hong Kong. At the end of last year, there were over 32,000 from the United States, that was up 9,000 since 1992; 27,000 from the United Kingdom, again up 9,000 over the previous three years; over 25,000 from Canada, up 8,000; nearly 20,000 from Australia, up 5,000; nearly 20,000 from Japan, up 7,000. They have not come to Hong Kong because they think Hong Kong is on the ropes. They have come to Hong Kong because they think that it offers more opportunities for them than are available to them at home. They are working for some of the 4,000 or so foreign companies which are present in Hong Kong.
Of course it is true that some of those foreign companies have been leaving. In the first half of the year, 115 companies stopped their Hong Kong operations. On the other hand, 338 companies started business in Hong Kong, which is I believe a pretty healthy surplus.
I am also confident about the future of Hong Kong, because of its location. As David said, it is at the heart of Asia and 1997 is not going to change that. It is at the centre of the economic revolution, which is probably transforming more lives for the better than anything else that has happened in human history. We used to talk about the Asian countries as dominoes; now we think of them quite properly as dynamos.
I am not so starry-eyed as to suppose that there are not problems ahead in many of the Asian countries - problems for example of political transition, problems of environmental degradation. How could you possibly have one of the greatest economic and social revolutions of not this but of any century without some occasionally choppy patches.
However, I believe everybody now increasingly recognises that the most important motor for the world economy in the next generation is going to be the increase in disposable income of Chinese and Indian workers and their families. 1.2 billion people in China discovering market forces has to be a very good thing, not just for them but for the rest of us too.