One Of The Hong Kong Listed Property Companies Invites Your Research Essay

One Of The Hong Kong Listed Property Companies Invites Your Research Institute To Formulate A Research Proposal To Them - Essay Example Hong Kong well illustrates patterns of a distinct Asian business model that has resulted in the growth and influence of large gargantuan business enterprises. The Hong Kong housing market is dominated by a hand full of these large companies that include Cheung Kong, Henderson Land, and SHK PPT among others. The growth of Cheung Kong, for example, underscores specific ways of pursuing business and industrial growth based on certain Asian principles and management styles. These styles project paternalistic family control and trust and the respectful acceptance of authority. Pyramid structures of benefit permeate the leadership hierarchy of these Asian firms along with family cross-shareholdings of subsidiary companies. Hong Kong’s rapid economic growth is described by Xiabin et al (2004) as a period of economic restructuring that has seen the country evolve from a manufacturing center to a business, commerce and finance center, with most of its working force moving into the serv ice industries. Influenced by processes of economic liberalisation, globalization, and government downsizing, the restructuring has resulted in a net rise of the middle-income population of Hong Kong, but since 1971 there has been a profound drop in the sharing of income by the bottom households while the income of the top 30% has shown a continual increase in income share (pp. 447-451). The authors note "there has been a steady exacerbation of income inequality in Hong Kong over the past 35 years" (p. 452) and, "There is no evidence of wealth trickling down from the top to the bottom" (p. 457). Nor have adequate services been expanded for the bottom poor. Xiabin et al (2004) emphasize the unsympathetic government policy of minimum intervention as a major factor in the ongoing policy of inequality. Resources provided for social welfare are sparse in comparison to resources for the more favored private sector. The authors propose the government avoids policies ameliorating income ine quality in order to maintain "business-friendly" policies toward private interests and avoid a "dependency culture" that would discourage unemployed people from working and affect economic growth in negative ways. Despite a sterling economic growth that has made it one of world's largest centers of concentrated among the world's wealthiest economies, Hong Kong demonstrates the highest degree of economic disparity among its seven million citizens. The United Nations report Hong Kong as having the highest Gini coefficient of 43.4, a measure of economic disparity between the rich in the poor, among all Asian cities (Oxfram). As of September, 2010, 10.2% of working families were living in poverty in Hong Kong (Oxfram). The Hong Kong Council of Social Service reported recently, October, 2010, that 1.26 million of the 7 million citizens were living in poverty, nearly one/fifth of the population (Wong, 2010). The contrast stands stark and grim where three million of seven million citizens live in public housing. Under current public policy, the gap between rich and poor in Hong Kong is steadily increasing. In 1997, The Canadian Magazine Maclean's highlighted the nearly 100,000 Hong Kong displaced workers living in the small spaces or "cages" where larger spaces are divided into small cubicles with wire (Wood, 1997). Web blogs and YouTube videos today provide stark