Therefore we are not positioning ourselves as a market that can match the supply and demand of Islamic products from domestic angle. 2  BIS Review 59/2008  Our objective is to make Hong Kong a platform for international intermediation activities for Islamic finance. What can we offer to the Islamic investors? Hong Kong’s advantages lie in its strategic location, highly developed financial markets and infrastructure, and a business-friendly free-market environment. We are strategically located at the heart of Asia with a broad hinterland that gives investors unique access to virtually every market in the Asia Pacific time zone. Almost all Asian countries are within reach by a three-hour flight from Hong Kong. What makes Hong Kong a natural destination for Islamic funds is our deep and highly liquid capital markets. Almost all of the most actively traded financial instruments are available for exchange in Hong Kong, and this gives Islamic investors a much wider choice of where to place their funds. More importantly, when it comes to investing in China, Hong Kong is about the only natural choice. Hong Kong has the largest and deepest Chinese equity and debt markets outside Mainland China. We are the first and remain the only major international financial centre that has banking business and financial products related to the renminbi. The development of a local renminbi bond market which started in the middle of last year has firmly positioned Hong Kong as a pilot market for China’s continuing financial market liberalisation.
If more people take part in the labour force, wages and thereby inflation should be held back. Developments in the wage bargaining rounds so far do not indicate that the potential labour supply is holding back wage demands quite as much as we had earlier estimated. Abolition of property tax on housing One of the Government’s proposals that has received considerable attention is the proposal to abolish property tax on housing. A working group has been commissioned by the Government to investigate a model that would finance this tax cut in the housing sector. In this model, the tax is replaced by a municipal charge and higher tax on profits made when selling property. In theory, a fully-financed proposal should not involve any effects on general housing price levels. However, in practice there is reason to believe that house prices will increase at a slightly faster rate due to the tax changes. In those parts of the country with high property taxes, and where the difference between the municipal tax and the current property tax is substantial, there could be fairly large price increases. But this would probably be mainly a one-off effect that did not have any more long-term effect on the rate of price increase. Therefore, a fully-financed abolition of the property tax would not necessarily have any major direct impact on CPI inflation.