Hong Kong has seen strong growth in labour productivity since 2002. Sectoral breakdown shows that the advance in output per labour has been mainly supported by the expansion in financial and trade related activities attributable to the vibrant increase in offshore trade and exports of financial...

The concept of trend inflation is crucial for macroeconomic analysis and policy formulation by central banks. In this paper, we compare measures of trend inflation in Hong Kong estimated by the exclusion and statistical methods. Our findings suggest that the trend inflation estimated by the...

This paper estimates the equilibrium path of the Hong Kong dollar real effective exchange rate (REER) and compares it with the actual path of the Hong Kong dollar REER to assess the extent of real exchange rate misalignment. Empirical results from various approaches of exchange rate assessment...

Increasing economic integration with Mainland China has contributed to the rapid expansion of service exports in Hong Kong. Growing at the current pace of 10-20% per annum, service exports would be a key contributor to GDP in the coming years, thanks to vibrant expansion in offshore trade and...

In this paper we attempt to delineate conceptual issues relating to the definition of capital flows, and introduce a framework that organises survey data and accounting information at different time horizons to form a judgment on the nature and scale of fund flows in Hong Kong. Given the...

Hong Kong has witnessed an equity initial public offering (IPO) boom since 2005. As the interbank payments involved in an IPO can be hundreds of times larger than the Aggregate Balance, increased funding needs and heightened demand for interbank liquidity may drive interbank interest rates up....

Hong Kong as a city-state economy often records current account surplus. Empirical results show that the surplus is positively related to trade openness, terms of trade, volatility of output gap, the M2-to-GDP ratio and the non-service-sector-to-GDP ratio, and is negatively associated with the...

This paper studies the significance of Mainland-related shocks in determining Hong Kong money market interest rates after controlling for the influences of US variables. Analysis using a vector auto-regression model suggests that an unexpected rise in the Mainland policy interest rate, or a...

Economic and financial developments on the Mainland have important implications for Hong Kong. This paper presents an empirical framework for assessing monetary and financial conditions on the Mainland by estimating a monetary conditions index (MCI). An MCI is usually defined as a weighted sum...

Property prices in Hong Kong increased markedly in late 2007 and early 2008, raising concerns about the risk of overheating in the property market. In this paper, we use co-integration analysis to analyze the short- and long-run determinants of property prices in Hong Kong. We find that the...