ENHANCE COMPETITIVENESS

Tsang stressed competitiveness, the theme of this budget, during his speech as the city must continue to strengthen its edge amid fast evolving circumstances.

Tsang said the key to the city's economic success has been to integrate with the global community, forge extensive and strong commercial ties with the rest of the world and to tap into markets outside Hong Kong.

"Manpower, land supply and an aging population are the major constraints to Hong Kong's future development," he said, "To overcome them, we must endeavor to nurture a wealth of suitable talent for the future, increase land supply to expand the scale of the economy and plan well ahead for an aging society."

Hong Kong has made full use of the mainland's economic boom. The city is the world's largest offshore Renminbi (RMB) business center.

RMB deposits and outstanding RMB certificates of deposits totaled more than 1 trillion yuan (163 billion U.S. dollars) at the end of last year in Hong Kong, accounting for 70 percent of the offshore pool of RMB liquidity.

As the world's financial centers are developing offshore RMB business, Tsang called for greater efforts to strengthen the city' s existing services, including RMB trade financing, RMB- denominated financial products and cross-border reinsurance, direct cross-border investment from the mainland, asset management and fund development.