19-02-2008, 10:29 AM
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#69 (permalink)
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Member
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Maidenhead
Posts: 292
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Smith and Hong Kong
From 12 Books that Changed the World p313
Quote:
And Hong Kong of course, is exemplary Smith. The man given credit for this was its British financial secretary, Sir John Cowperthwaite, a zealous free-trader who put his ideas into practice in this forlorn outpost of half a million people.
Milton Friedman summarises the results of Cowperthwaite's reforms:
"In 1960... the average income in Hong Kong was 28% that of Great Britain; by 1996 it had risen to 137% of that in Britain. In short, from 1960 to 1996 Hong Kong's per capital income rose from being about one quarter of Britain's to more than a third larger than Britain's. It's easy to state these figures. It is more difficult to realise their significance. Compare Britain, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the nineteenth-century economic superpower on whose empire the sun never set, with Hong Kong, a spit of land, overcrowded, with no reserves except a great harbour. Yet within four decades the residents of this spit of overcrowded land had achieved a level of income one third higher than that enjoyed by the residents of its former mother country"
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