Positive Non-interventionism
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Positive Non-interventionism
Positive non-interventionism was the economic policy of Hong Kong; this policy can be traced back to the time when Hong Kong was under United Kingdom, British rule. It was first officially implemented in 1971 by Financial Secretary (Hong Kong), Financial Secretary of Hong Kong John James Cowperthwaite, John Cowperthwaite, who believed that the economy was doing well in the absence of government intervention but that it was important to create the regulatory and physical infrastructure to facilitate free market, market-based decision making. The policy was continued by subsequent Financial Secretaries, including Sir Philip Haddon-Cave. Economist Milton Friedman has cited it as a fairly comprehensive implementation of laissez-faire policy. First-hand explanation According to Cowperthwaite: In the long run, the aggregate of decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is less likely to do harm than the centralised dec ...
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Economic Policy
The economy of governments covers the systems for setting levels of taxation, government budgets, the money supply and interest rates as well as the labour market, national ownership, and many other areas of government interventions into the economy. Most factors of economic policy can be divided into either fiscal policy, which deals with government actions regarding taxation and spending, or monetary policy, which deals with central banking actions regarding the money supply and interest rates. Such policies are often influenced by international institutions like the International Monetary Fund or World Bank as well as political beliefs and the consequent policies of parties. Types of economic policy Almost every aspect of government has an important economic component. A few examples of the kinds of economic policies that exist include: *Macroeconomic stabilization policy, which attempts to keep the money supply growing at a rate that does not result in excessive inflatio ...
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Hong Kong
Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta in South China. With 7.5 million residents of various nationalities in a territory, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world. Hong Kong is also a major global financial centre and one of the most developed cities in the world. Hong Kong was established as a colony of the British Empire after the Qing Empire ceded Hong Kong Island from Xin'an County at the end of the First Opium War in 1841 then again in 1842.. The colony expanded to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 after the Second Opium War and was further extended when Britain obtained a 99-year lease of the New Territories in 1898... British Hong Kong was occupied by Imperial Japan from 1941 to 1945 during World War II; British administration resume ...
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United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, and many smaller islands within the British Isles. Northern Ireland shares a land border with the Republic of Ireland; otherwise, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel, the Celtic Sea and the Irish Sea. The total area of the United Kingdom is , with an estimated 2020 population of more than 67 million people. The United Kingdom has evolved from a series of annexations, unions and separations of constituent countries over several hundred years. The Treaty of Union between the Kingdom of England (which included Wales, annexed in 1542) and the Kingdom of Scotland in 170 ...
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Financial Secretary (Hong Kong)
The Financial Secretary () is the title held by the Hong Kong government minister who is responsible for all economic and financial matters (“Department of Finance” per Article 60 of the Basic Law). The position is among the three most senior Principal Officials of the Government, second only to the Chief Secretary in the order of precedence (but not subordinate to the CS). Together with other secretaries, the Financial Secretary is accountable to the Legislative Council and the Chief Executive (the Governor before the 1997 transfer of sovereignty) for his actions in supervising the formulation and implementation of financial and economic policies. The position evolved out of the office of the Colonial Treasurer before 1940. The Financial Secretary is a member of the Executive Council, and gives advice to the Chief Executive in that capacity. He is also responsible for delivering the annual budget to the Legislative Council. To date, it is the only office among the thr ...
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John James Cowperthwaite
Sir John James Cowperthwaite, KBE, CMG (; 25 April 1915 – 21 January 2006), was a British civil servant who served as Financial Secretary of Hong Kong from 1961 to 1971. His introduction of free market economic policies are widely credited with turning postwar Hong Kong into a thriving global financial centre. During Cowperthwaite's tenure as Financial Secretary, real wages in Hong Kong rose by 50% and the portion of the population in acute poverty fell from 50% to 15%. Early years Cowperthwaite was born on 25 April 1915 in Edinburgh to John Cowperthwaite, a surveyor of taxes, and Jessie Jarvis. He attended Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh, Scotland, and later studied classics at St Andrews University and Christ's College, Cambridge. In 1940, he gained a first class degree in economics at St Andrews University on an accelerated one year degree programme with Professor James Nisbet. He joined the British Colonial Administrative Service as a Hong Kong Cadet in 1941, b ...
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Government Intervention
Economic interventionism, sometimes also called state interventionism, is an economic policy position favouring government intervention in the market process with the intention of correcting market failures and promoting the general welfare of the people. An economic intervention is an action taken by a government or international institution in a market economy in an effort to impact the economy beyond the basic regulation of fraud, enforcement of contracts, and provision of public goods and services. Economic intervention can be aimed at a variety of political or economic objectives, such as promoting economic growth, increasing employment, raising wages, raising or reducing prices, promoting income equality, managing the money supply and interest rates, increasing profits, or addressing market failures. The term ''intervention'' is typically used by advocates of ''laissez-faire'' and free market capitalism, and assumes that, on a philosophical level, the state and economy ...
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Free Market
In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority. Proponents of the free market as a normative ideal contrast it with a regulated market, in which a government intervenes in supply and demand by means of various methods such as taxes or regulations. In an idealized free market economy, prices for goods and services are set solely by the bids and offers of the participants. Scholars contrast the concept of a free market with the concept of a coordinated market in fields of study such as political economy, new institutional economics, economic sociology and political science. All of these fields emphasize the importance in currently existing market systems of rule-making institutions external to the simple forces of supply and demand which create space for those ...
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Philip Haddon-Cave
Sir Charles Philip Haddon-Cave, , (; 6 July 1925 – 27 September 1999) was a British colonial administrator. He was the Financial Secretary of Hong Kong from 1971 to 1981 and the Chief Secretary of Hong Kong from 1981 to 1985. During his tenure of Financial Secretary, he famously coined the term "positive non-interventionism" as its chief principle, which has long-lasting effect on Hong Kong and world's economic philosophy. Early life and government career Haddon-Cave was born in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia with his brother David and sister Pamela. He was educated at the University of Tasmania and King's College, Cambridge. He joined the British Colonial Service in 1952 was assigned to Kenya, British East Africa. In 1961, he was appointed Financial Secretary in the Seychelles. In 1963, he was transferred to work in the Hong Kong government, working in the Department of Trade and Industry. In 1965, he became the Director of Trade and Industry and was promoted Deputy Secretary ...
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Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman (; July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students, young professors and academics who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr. Friedman's challenges to what he called "naive Keynesian theory" began with his interpretation ...
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Laissez-faire
''Laissez-faire'' ( ; from french: laissez faire , ) is an economic system in which transactions between private groups of people are free from any form of economic interventionism (such as subsidies) deriving from special interest groups. As a system of thought, ''laissez-faire'' rests on the following axioms: "the individual is the basic unit in society, i.e. the standard of measurement in social calculus; the individual has a natural right to freedom; and the physical order of nature is a harmonious and self-regulating system." Another basic principle of ''laissez-faire'' holds that markets should naturally be competitive, a rule that the early advocates of ''laissez-faire'' always emphasized. With the aims of maximizing freedom by allowing markets to self-regulate, early advocates of ''laissez-faire'' proposed a ''impôt unique'', a tax on land rent (similar to Georgism) to replace all taxes that they saw as damaging welfare by penalizing production. Proponents of ''l ...
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Economic Growth
Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of increase in the real gross domestic product, or real GDP. Growth is usually calculated in real terms – i.e., inflation-adjusted terms – to eliminate the distorting effect of inflation on the prices of goods produced. Measurement of economic growth uses national income accounting. Since economic growth is measured as the annual percent change of gross domestic product (GDP), it has all the advantages and drawbacks of that measure. The economic growth-rates of countries are commonly compared using the ratio of the GDP to population (per-capita income). The "rate of economic growth" refers to the geometric annual rate of growth in GDP between the first and the last year over a period of time. This growth rate represents the trend in ...
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Open Economy
An open economy is a type of economy where not only domestic factors but also entities in other countries engage in trade of products (goods and services). Trade can take the form of managerial exchange, technology transfers, and all kinds of goods and services. Certain exceptions exist that cannot be exchanged; the railway services of a country, for example, cannot be traded with another country to avail the service. It contrasts with a closed economy in which international trade and finance cannot take place. The act of selling goods or services to a foreign country is called exporting. The act of buying goods or services from a foreign country is called importing. Exporting and importing are collectively called international trade. Advantages and Disadvantages There are a number of economic advantages for citizens of a country with an open economy. A primary advantage is that the citizen consumers have a much larger variety of goods and services from which to choose. Add ...
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