Thomas Piketty, perhaps the world’s most famous living economist (aided here by Li Yang, both of the Paris School of Economics) has turned his attention to the subject of Hong Kong.
Specifically, he’s looked at the period from 1981 to the present and notes the significant increase in income and wealth inequality. He further notes losers in this process tend to be more democratically inclined whilst winners favor the status quo making them, de facto, pro-Beijing.
Along the way he wryly observes “…the case of Hong Kong illustrates an intriguing and probably unique example in history of a country becoming more unequal in terms of income and wealth after becoming officially “communist”,…”
This is a charged subject and as somebody who has been a Hong Kong resident for most of this period I am, try as I might not to be, partisan.
For this reason I’m going to halt my summary here. If you care about the issue you must read the paper and form your own conclusions. You can access it in full via this link Hong Kong’s Pluto-Communism.
Before I sign off though I’ve extracted some of the more striking charts from the work. Even harsh criticism of the methodology is unlikely to alter the broader picture.
First and perhaps the biggest issue of all, the rise of the rentier. The first chart shows how much income is being produced in Hong Kong from capital alone versus some other advanced economies…
You may struggle to locate Hong Kong in the next panel. It is, practically, off the charts…
Staying with superlatives, nowhere in the world comes close to the concentration of wealth in Hong Kong (below)…
Housing (the final extract below), is unequivocally a factor in the inequality equation. On this issue a robust policy response at some stage, IMHO, is therefore an inevitability…
Happy Sunday.