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The following is a transcript (English portion) of the Secretary for Economic Development and Labour, Mr Stephen Ip, speaking to the press on the latest unemployment rate at the Central Government Offices today (July 17):

Stephen Ip: The unemployment rate for the period April to June 2003 is 8.6%, and the underemployment rate rose from 3.8% to 4.3%.

Total labour force expanded by about 6 500 to 3.52 million. The number of unemployed persons increased by around 12 000 to 300 000. While the number of underemployed rose by around 16 000 to 151 000.

The unemployment rate rose noticeably in the restaurants/hotels, wholesale/retail, transport, and recreational services sectors. While the underemployment rate increases were observed mostly in the construction, transport and hotels sectors.

There are signs of gradual revival in overall business activity recently. But because of the new batch of fresh graduates leaving school, this will add pressure to our employment situation.

Reporter: How will you deal with the deficit ... the Hong Kong Government?

Stephen Ip: I think we have a healthy financial system and we are not worried.

Reporter: ...towards the end of this year ... and when will you see a downward trend?

Stephen Ip: I just explained the number of visitors, the hotel occupancy rate have improved significantly over the past few weeks. We are talking about a hotel occupancy rate of about 60%, this is much better than the 15% rate in May. The number of visitors also shows significant improvement. In the case of our airport, the number of daily visitors for example we are talking about around 80 000 passengers everyday now in the month of July. But in June there were only about 40 000 each day, and in the case of May sometimes down to 20 000. So you can see that there has been considerable improvement in these sectors. And I believe that since there will be quite a number of exhibitions, conventions to be held next month, the hotel occupancy rate will continue to improve. And also because of the "individual scheme" (residents of four Guangdong cities may apply to visit Hong Kong in their individual capacity)to be implemented later this month, we expect there will be about 1 million more visitors from Guangdong to Hong Kong this year. All these will help tourism, hotel, restaurant, and retail business. From this viewpoint, we believe that there should be improvement in the employment situation in the last quarter.

(Please also refer to the Chinese portion)

End/Thursday, July 17, 2003

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