ENG-1976 — Page 31

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TWO DECADES OF ECONOMIC ACHIEVEMENT

goods and fuel during the same period increased respectively at an average annual rate of 8.2 per cent, 8.4 per cent and 28.1 per cent, explaining most of the average annual rate of increase in export prices of 9.6 per cent.

The Future

As to the future: just as the growth and the changing structure of the population have had an important influence in the past, so will these factors continue to affect the economy. Hong Kong has been passing through a phase where the labour force has been growing much faster than the population as a whole. Within five years and assuming no large scale inflows of people from outside Hong Kong, this trend will be reversed and by the mid eighties the labour force will be growing far less rapidly than the total population. Inevitably the average growth of the Gross Domestic Product will decline; by how much will depend on rates of increase in productivity.

The provision through public sector expenditure of such economic and social infrastructure as the new towns, education and industrial land are all designed to add to the productive potential of the economy. The financial sector, which developed in size and complexity in the 1970s, is also likely to continue to be a sector of the Hong Kong economy with rapid growth. But the final outcome of all these possi- bilities will depend on economic and financial developments in the rest of the world- a constraint and stimulus that has always been and will continue to be with Hong Kong.

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