Hong Kong's Population Decline
Hong Kong's Population Decline
April 21, 2002 Posted: 11:09 AM HKT (0309 GMT)
By Alex Frew McMillan
Hong Kong's birth rate is dropping. Rising unemployment grabs the headlines. But the birth figure is the one some stock-market participants do not want to discuss openly.
The reason? It shows a trend toward an aging population, and ultimately a struggling, even dying, economy. Hong Kong's jobless rate hit 7.0 percent, the government said this week--a level Hong Kong has never before been seen. Good and bad economic times come and go. It is the birth rate that shows a more alarming trend, as painful as joblessness is.
Hong Kong's population is falling, but not in the traditional sense. New immigrants make up for people moving away, as they always have, even during the 1997 handover to China from the United Kingdom.
"In the early '90s, there were a lot of emigrants, but there were also quite a lot of people coming from mainland China, so that counterbalanced it," explained Billy Li, a statistician for the Hong Kong government. "So in the last decade, the population has been growing all the time."
April 21, 2002 Posted: 11:09 AM HKT (0309 GMT)
By Alex Frew McMillan
Hong Kong's birth rate is dropping. Rising unemployment grabs the headlines. But the birth figure is the one some stock-market participants do not want to discuss openly.
The reason? It shows a trend toward an aging population, and ultimately a struggling, even dying, economy. Hong Kong's jobless rate hit 7.0 percent, the government said this week--a level Hong Kong has never before been seen. Good and bad economic times come and go. It is the birth rate that shows a more alarming trend, as painful as joblessness is.
Hong Kong's population is falling, but not in the traditional sense. New immigrants make up for people moving away, as they always have, even during the 1997 handover to China from the United Kingdom.
"In the early '90s, there were a lot of emigrants, but there were also quite a lot of people coming from mainland China, so that counterbalanced it," explained Billy Li, a statistician for the Hong Kong government. "So in the last decade, the population has been growing all the time."