7
HK to promote sales of services overseas: DGT
Hong Kong will be looking to identify ways of promoting sales of services overseas, including through constructive involvement in negotiations under the World Trade Organisation, the Director-General of Trade, Mr Tony Miller, said today (Friday).
"We will also be looking at our own regulatory systems with a view to ensuring that they enhance rather than impede competitiveness," he said,
"We will also be giving a new emphasis in education and training to meet the needs of our services sector for the future."
Addressing a luncheon meeting of the Japan Hong Kong Society in Tokyo, Mr Miller said: "In the early days, Hong Kong made its money from warehousing, trade finance, insurance, shipping and port services. Manufacturing came much later, almost by accident, during the quarter century when China was shut off from trade and investment with the rest of the world.
"At the end of the 70s, China re-opened its door. During the 80s, Hong Kong's manufacturers moved land and labour intensive processes north of the border and invested in new production there.
"Yet, unemployment was kept very low as new jobs were created to service the growing re-export trade."
Describing Hong Kong as a community which cultivates competition rather than resisting it, Mr Miller said Hong Kong had not simply gone from manufacturing to services, but rather from low skill to higher skill jobs, and from low value-added to higher value-added functions.
"Our burgeoning new services economy is not simply the shipping, warehousing, insurance and trade financing of the pre-war entrepot days, but now covers an enormously broad range of highly skilled professional, business, social, artistic and entertainment services, as well as tourism, transportation and communications," he said.
"We have also developed our own way of doing things, our own skills, our own solutions to problems, our own designs, our own culture.