TNAG-1607-FCO40-22122-Minutes-and-Hansards-of-the-Legislative-Council-of-Hong-Kong-1987 — Page 39

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Secondly and this is a particular problem for planners at the senior Government level our manufacturing industry is geared to demand in major markets thousands of We miles away and very different in character to our own. produce largely to the designs of others, to the specifications and standards set out in our market countries and must relate our costs and prices to what the consumers in these countries

will pay.

We have no domestic market of a size which would make sense to our principal industries and even if we did it would still be open to the goods of every other country in the world. Our application of the free trade principle is so absolute that we have no legal means of restricting imports even if we wanted to. Our manufacturers then must assess their own markets and must develop their own products essentially by themselves and without any form of direct assistance or protection. That is the policy we have long followed and, to date, it has proved eminently successful.

It is however abundantly clear that Hong Kong's manufacturing industry is already experiencing constant and increasing pressure from competitors who seek by all means at their disposal to expand their share of the same foreign markets we are selling into. Essentially these are the developed country markets and there are only relatively few of them. All our efforts in recent years to diversify our market base have been largely unsuccessful, except for China, and we reply on only six markets for a very large proportion of our

exports.

The Governments of a number of the countries which compete most effectively against us follow very different industrial policies to our own. Some have been prepared to spend large sums of public money on specialized technical training, on industrially oriented tertiary education, on research and development at both the tertiary and production levels, in setting up special institutes of learning and training related to industry and, of course, in protecting