Laissez-faire’s Limitations: The Evolution of Monetary Policy in Hong Kong, 1935–80

Leo Goodstadt

Chapter 4 in Hong Kong SAR’s Monetary and Exchange Rate Challenges, 2009, pp 75-94 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Hong Kong’s path to prosperity has been very different from other Third World societies. Its economic performance in the second half of the last century was a record of sustained and largely self-financed success.2 Its growth rates were, arguably, unparalleled in economic history, and real GDP increased each year without exception from 1961 until 1998.3 Economic expansion was never hindered by a shortage of the capital needed to finance high-speed growth.4 Also remarkable was how little change took place in the government’s economic policies. Laissez-faire was discarded by the rest of the world but flourished in Hong Kong together with free trade, a belief in the efficacy of free market forces and minimal state interference with business. Hong Kong also stuck to the monetary arrangements of the past. It retained a ‘currency board’ system, and the government insisted that interventionist monetary policies were unnecessary because the Hong Kong economy was self-regulating.

Keywords: Exchange Rate; Monetary Policy; Banking System; Money Supply; Bank Lending (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:pmschp:978-0-230-59474-6_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230594746

DOI: 10.1057/9780230594746_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Banking and Financial Institutions from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().