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Date: 2024/02/21
Time: 14:00~16:00
Venue: Archives 3rd Conference Hall
Host: Prof. Kuan-Jen Chen (Assistant research fellow, IMH,AS)
Speaker:Prof. Macabe Keliher (Associate Professor, Southern Methodist University)
Organizer: IMH
Abstract: Hong Kong was one of the fastest growing economies in the postwar world, regularly registering annual GDP increases over 20 percent and real per capital income of over 6 percent. Scholars frequently explain this phenomenon as a result of the perfect combination of macroeconomic stability, rule of law, and free markets. Showing the fallacy of this explanation I argue that Hong Kong’s postwar economy was a result of political competition and economic warfare between the US-Taiwan alliance and the PRC. Drawing on firm-level interviews and archives, this study traces the role of the largest industrial machine supplier in Hong Kong, Universe Machinery Enterprises; it shows that Hong Kong firms acquired advanced manufacturing capacity in key industries from the PRC through Universe, facilitating industrial upgrading and growth.