CO129-558-3 Levy on Salaries- petition from Chinese Civil Servants 3-1-1936 - 19-12-1936 — Page 202

2.

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are included in the normal budget of a working class family, in

particular, rice, fuel, vegetables and peanut oil. Other items of expenditure, such as travelling expenses, electric light, and wages of domestic servants, have not altered materially during this period, while house rents have fallen generally. The course of prices of clothing and manufactured articles of

foreign origin is less easy to trace, but it may safely be

assumed that they have varied inversely with the exchange rate

of the local dollar, with some tendency to cheapening. The

extent to which such articles enter into a family budget depends,

of course, directly on the salary of the officer concerned. On

the whole, it is not unsafe to take the food and fuel indices as

representing the trend of family budgets in all dollar paid

grades.

5.

The statements regarding percentage increases set

out in paragraph 17 of the petition are not entirely supported,

so far as the prices of locally produced commodities are

concerned, by the records kept for some years past by the

Secretary for Chinese Affairs, on which Mr. Young's figures

were based. In any event the calculations of the petitioners

appear to be based on a comparison of prices obtainable in July 1935, when the higher exchange still had its full effect,

with those prevailing at the time the petition was prepared.

With regard to paragraph 17(b) of the petition, up to the end

of 1934 the exchange between Hong Kong and Shanghai was fairly

constant, the premium on Hong Kong dollars being about 10%.

When China abandoned the silver standard the premium rose to

40% and has since fallen to about 7%. The exchange between

Hong Kong and Canton has for some time fluctuated between very

wide limits, the premium on the Hong Kong dollar at the present

time being in the neighbourhood of 25% in the case of Canton

silver and 50% in the case of Canton notes. A very large