Macau has risen in the rankings of property consultancy firm JLL’s biannual Global Real Estate Transparency Index 2018, becoming a “semi-transparent” market.
The rise, one of the steepest seen in this year’s ranking, is associated with the local government’s recent efforts to tackle money laundering, as well as its embrace of increased monitoring by financial regulators.
Macau now ranks 60th on a list of 100 jurisdictions worldwide, just below Argentina and above Vietnam. This represents a 10-spot increase from the 2016 index.
As a region, Asia-Pacific has made the strongest transparency gains in JLL’s index, led by jurisdictions including Macau, Myanmar, Thailand and India.
Leading the list were the Anglophone countries of the United Kingdom (1), Australia (2), the United States (3) and Canada (5), which qualified as “highly transparent”. France placed fourth on the list.
Meanwhile, Singapore (12) edged out Hong Kong (13) to top the list of “transparent” jurisdictions. China is ranked 33rd, the highest among the “semi-transparent” cohort, while Taiwan is 26th, one spot below Portugal. The worst performers on the list were Libya and Venezuela.
On several occasions last year, the MSAR was praised for actions taken to combat money laundering, including closer financial supervision of the gaming and junket industry.
Nevertheless, Macau was given mixed reviews at a meeting of the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering last year, when member states concluded that local authorities lacked willingness to prosecute and had low conviction rates for money laundering crimes.
The Global Real Estate Transparency Index is updated every two years and records the evolution of real estate transparency. It is based on a combination of quantitative market data and survey results. It takes into account factors such as market fundamentals, the regulatory and legal framework and governance of listed vehicles.
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