ENG-1969 — Page 37

HONG KONG MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY IN THE SIXTIES

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effective permanent staff and to make a real contribution to export development. It was complemented by establishment also in 1967 of an Export Credit Insurance Corporation, with adequate official capital backing and credit resources. This too has proved a highly successful autonomous undertaking.

More directly related to industry was the final stimulus given in 1963 by the Labour Department to institutionalising the productivity movement, whose banner had hitherto been kept flying principally through the efforts of the Hong Kong Management Association, established several years before, and of the Education Department's Technical College. A provisional Productivity Council was established in 1966 and given legislative sanction in 1967. By the end of that year it had set up an officially financed productivity centre, whose task was to improve the productivity of manufacturing industry, particularly small and medium scale industry. The centre was to complement on a wider and more intensive scale the work of the Management Association and has moved systematically from small beginnings to setting up, for instance, its own consultancy service for which it charges a fee. The Productivity Centre is the principal practical link with the Asian Productivity Organisation, with head- quarters in Japan, of which Hong Kong became a member in June 1963. The APO, with its technical bias and practical attitudes, is a forum in which Hong Kong can play an effective role. Hong Kong's director on the management board of the APO was elected its chairman for 1969, a year in which he was responsible for pre- paratory work on the Asian Productivity Year in 1970.

Hong Kong's APO director, appointed ad personam by the Governor, has for the last three years been also the elected Chair- man of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries, the only industrial organisation which can with justification claim to be representative of all industry. The Federation was established by statute in 1960, partly as a result of official initiative; it is on the whole, but not exclusively, representative of larger-scale industry. The Federation has had a considerable measure of success in publicising Hong Kong industry and as a centre of ideas for its development. It has interested itself increasingly in relatively inexpensive but valuable infrastructural developments such as a reference library of inter- national standards and a testing laboratory, both of which are

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