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HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL 1st October 1971.
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rate of nearly 16 per cent annually; and in 1970 their value totalled $12,350 million, so placing Hong Kong among the top ten trading countries in terms of exports per head of population.
Now these are of course very high rates of growth, and among the developing countries there are less than half a dozen whose growth rates have consistently matched ours in recent years. That we have achieved this degree of economic success is a tribute to the prodigious efforts made by the whole community; workers, managers, employers and Government alike. But it is a very high rate of growth, and we must not be too surprised if it now begins to prove difficult to maintain these rates in percentage terms: moreover if this should occur, we must always remember that reversion to more modest percentage growth rates, on an expanded base, would still mean a satisfactory degree of economic progress.
As our economy has become more complex so a whole new range of institutions has been set up to help co-ordinate and promote the process. Among them, I mention and I mention, in no particular order, such organizations as the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, the Hong Kong Productivity Council, the Hong Kong Tourist Association, the Hong Kong Export Credit Insurance Corporation, the Hong Kong Management Association, the Federation of Hong Kong Industries, the Hong Kong Industrial Design Council, the Hong Kong Shippers' Council and the Hong Kong Packaging Council, while bodies with an older history, such as the Textile Advisory Board and the Trade and Industry Advisory Board have been adapted to meet changing circumstances. The effort that has gone into creating these various institutions is proving well worthwhile and they are now playing a major part in increasing both our competitiveness and the quality of our products.
The policy of deliberately leaving industry and commerce to reach their own business decisions as far as possible, while at the same time taking care to ensure that our fiscal and our other policies create a business climate which encourages confidence, investment, innovation and growth, has, in short, served us very well.
But it is vital to provide that physical infrastructure without which there can be no satisfactory economic expansion. Plover Cove is now a world famous engineering achievement and High Island in its turn will be no less. Together they will have added 110,000 million gallons to our storage capacity-a sevenfold increase-but the demand for water is, of course, rising rapidly. It was 100 million gallons a day in the summer of 1964 and grew to 190 million gallons a day this summer, making it necessary for us to experiment with large scale desalting plants against the day when our conventional water resources would have been fully exploited. In this context we are grateful for the continuing
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