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The Financial Secretary, Mr Antony Leung, visits the Hong Kong Gifts & Premium Fair and Hong Kong Houseware Fair 2003 organised by the Trade Development Council at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre this (April 30) afternoon. Following is the transcript (English portion) of a media-session by Mr Leung after the visit:
Financial Secretary: I am happy to be here today and I have visited these shows in previous years. Firstly on the products, this time I see a lot of products that are extremely creative and of very high quality. The Government has said many, many times that really the future for Hong Kong industries, and indeed for Hong Kong, lies in improving the quality, having products and services that are creative and original and also delivered with speed. I think in today's exhibition, you see a lot of products belonging to all these categories, so I'm extremely pleased. I'm also pleased to note that despite the fact that the visitor flow is lower than the past years, many of our exhibitors are reporting fairly good business. Actually, some of them report better business than last year, so indeed the result is extremely encouraging and I think this is due to the collective efforts of the exhibitors as well as the TDC and Jeff's Association. So all of these show that the vitality of the Hong Kong businessmen and the overseas businessmen is still here.
Reporter: Mr Leung, the Government has just released statistics on the Budget deficit currently stands at 61.7 billion dollars, how would you react to this? Do you think the figure could increase because the impacts by SARS?
Financial Secretary: Well firstly, we've just released the latest update on the current forecast estimate for the fiscal year 2002-2003. Our original estimate was $70 billion. Now it comes to $61.7 billion. So it is 8.3 billion dollars better than the original estimate. The reduced deficit for last year was the result of two factors. Firstly, there was an increase in the revenue on various counts, investment income, salary tax and profit tax, because some people paid their taxes earlier than we anticipated. But on the other hand, one should also note that we have a lower expenditure number, both in the recurrent expenditure as well as in the non- recurrent expenditure. And you'll notice that the Government throughout these years, particularly in the last two years or so, has increased its effort in controlling expenditure. So that has resulted in a lower expenditure, lower than our estimate in March. So that explains why the fiscal deficit for last year is now estimated to be $61.7 billion
As far as this year is concerned, we believe that the deficit will be larger than our original estimate, largely because of the atypical pneumonia. As we all know, the disease will have an impact on the Hong Kong economy and it will have an impact, both on the expenditure and on the revenue side. The Government has also announced, just last week, a relief package of $11.8 billion and that will come out of the fiscal reserve and therefore will come into the fiscal deficit as well. But exactly how large the number will be, I think it is too early to tell. Our number one task is to control the spread of the atypical pneumonia disease. That is the Government's number one task, we will spare no effort, we will spare no resources in curbing the spreading of this disease. Obviously the Government is also thinking about all kinds of measures to revive the economy. The relief measures were part of it, to help the economy at this particular stage, but once the disease is under control, the Government will launch measures to revive the economy and we are working on those measures.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
End/Wednesday, April 30, 2003
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