New office to coordinate Greater Bay Area development

A new office to coordinate the development of the Greater Bay Area will be established in the near future, Hong Kong chief secretary Matthew Cheung revealed yesterday. According to The Standard, the new office will function as a “SAR Liaison Office”, responsible for coordinating different administrations’ departments, trade associations and professional bodies.

To be called the Guangdong-Hong Kong- Macau Bay Area Development Office, the entity will be established by the Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau, with the aim of promoting development opportunities in the Greater Bay Area.

The announcement comes as the rhetoric on the Bay Area picks up ahead of the official plan which will be soon revealed by Beijing.

The urban metropolis area – comprised of nine mainland cities situated around the Pearl River Delta estuary as well as the two special administrative regions of Macau and Hong Kong – is home to more than 67 million people, putting it on par with some of Europe’s most populous countries like Britain, France and Italy.

Its gross domestic product is about USD1.4 trillion, slightly behind the world’s leading bay areas of New York and Tokyo.

But the Greater Bay Area is already the global market leader when it comes to shipping and logistics. According to Secretary Cheung, the total container throughout Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Guangzhou is approximately three times more than that of the world’s three biggest bay areas combined.

According to The Standard, Cheung attempted to address the concerns of Hong Kong youth over the economic integration project.

Glossing over some of the political and economic concerns harbored by youth in the city, the Hong Kong Secretary attributed their caution to the fact that youngsters do not understand the region’s development potential and their unwillingness to travel to the mainland to live and work.