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We're one of the strongest and best run economies in the world. Think tanks abroad name us year after year as the free-est economy anywhere. And when it comes to competitiveness, they place us right up there near the top of the first division. The International Monetary Fund keeps an eagle eye on how all the world's economies perform. And they give Hong Kong what might be called, if you were talking about the theatre rather than economics, rave reviews. They think that so far as running a sophisticated economy is concerned, we've got it just about right. The Hong Kong formula is one which is unreservedly recommended for others. While the size of our total economy has grown massively, so that nowadays it's roughly the same as one fifth of the whole of China's, the amount that individual men and women are worth has also soared. Today our wealth per head, which I guess is about the best way of judging the strength of an economy and the prosperity of its people, is higher than that of people in Australia, in Canada or in the UK. We have massive financial reserves. We have healthy surpluses. We are the 4th largest investor in other countries. We invest overseas, according to the UN figures, almost 10 times as much as Singapore.
Look north and west from Hong Kong island and you see evidence that we're the busiest container port anywhere. We've got the 3rd busiest airport in the world and we're building what will be the 2nd busiest. The bridges, the tunnels, the new roads and railways, the new universities and hospitals, the new office buildings and shopping malls - all that sign of activity is striking evidence of our long term vitality.
Like any
other great city, we've made great social progress as well. Look at the blocks of new flats where there were once squatter huts and shanty towns. Remember the days when Hong Kong suffered from epidemic disease and then look at today's health statistics which are comparable with any of the richer countries in the world. And note our life expectancy is longer than anywhere except Japan.
One of the things which I notice particularly is the impact of education on our society. I'm the titular head as Governor of all our tertiary institutions so that I spend many afternoons each year at graduation ceremonies. I see the growing ranks of young people in Hong Kong who've enjoyed the benefits of a university education. When I go to people's housing authority flats I see the photographs of their children or grandchildren who've graduated in their caps and gowns. Those are proud records of an astonishing social revolution. 10 years ago about 1 in every 33 of Hong Kong's young people went into tertiary education. Today almost 1 in 4 do so.
What else do we see in Hong Kong? Well we don't see what has become a real puzzle in many rich societies elsewhere. There people worry over the fact that rising prosperity has been accompanied by rising rather than falling crime. But here we've seen the reverse. I know that low crime is not acceptable. The only thing that would satisfy that criterion is no crime at all. But we've done incredibly well in our city with overall crime down and violent crime down, too. And down on the figures not just of the year before last but down on the figures in the early 1980s.