According to the General Administration of Customs, since the implementation of Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) between Chinese mainland and HK and Macao SARs from Jan.1, 2004, the HK-made products enjoying "zero tariff" preferential treatment imported by Chinese mainland has involved a total of 2,577 certificates of origin, with the import volume hitting 127 million US dollars and the preferential tariff volume reaching RMB 66.433 million yuan; and the Macao-made products enjoying "zero tariff" preferential treatment imported by Chinese mainland has involved a total of 61 certificates of origin, with the import volume standing at 232,200 US dollars and the preferential tariff volume topping RMB 122,000 yuan.

Statistics released by General Administration of Customs showed that HK enterprises have received notable benefits in one year since the implementation of CEPA. In the past year, a total of 67 products under CEPA duty paragraph has enjoyed the preferential "zero tariff", including medicine, garments, textile, spice and jewelry. Particularly, the Chinese patent medicine received the most notable benefits among all the products, with the total preferential tariff standing at RMB 13.598 million yuan, taking up 20.5 percent of the total preferential tariff. Polystyrene and spice ranked the second and third place respectively. All the benefit-receiving commodities are the traditional exports from HK and the structure of benefit-receiving products was in accordance with the actual industrial condition in HK.

With the further deepening of CEPA, the improvement it has brought about begins to produce effects in terms of the industry restructuring in HK, absorption of foreign capital and acceleration of industrial development. According to the statistics released by Hong Kong Investment Promotion Institute, the amount of direct foreign investment poured in HK has reached 24.8 billion US dollars by the end of the third quarter of 2004, an increase of 82 percent higher than 13.6 billion US dollar achieved in the whole year of 2004. Among the 167 enterprises that invested in HK in the first three quarters last year, 20 percent of them did them for the sake of CEPA.

By People's Daily Online