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Past Event

A Foreign Policy and Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies Event

The Economic and Political Effects of Air Pollution in Hong Kong and China

Asia


Event Summary

Hong Kong's economy is widely regarded as the freest in the world and China's the fastest-growing among large economies. As these economies develop, however, so do problems of environmental degradation. Contaminants from the factories of Guangdong, combined with emissions from cars in Hong Kong, have pushed the Hong Kong's air pollution higher than the levels of Los Angeles, New York, London, or Paris, and had a significant impact on its quality of life. Containing the spread of pollution from outside of Hong Kong has become one of the public-policy principal challenges facing officials there and in China.

Event Information

When

Monday, February 12, 2007
12:00 AM to

Where

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC
Map

Contact: Brookings Office of Communications

E-mail: events@brookings.edu

Phone: 202.797.6105

Transcript

CHRISTINE LOH: I will touch on China as a whole. You will be seeing some satellite aggregate pictures of pollutants. I will focus quite a lot on Hong Kong, which is also a proxy for Southern China as a whole and, of course, it is part of the China development story.

Well, I am just going to run through some numbers very quickly. These are numbers that you read regularly in international media. I am not going to read everything out. Basically, the pace of urbanization and industrialization in China has just been tremendous for the last 25 years.

Just so that we have a reference point, in about the mid-1950s, 60 percent of Japanese were still in agriculture. Today in Japan, there are only 3 percent of the population that engage in agriculture. Just imagine -- with this tremendous urbanization process, by about 2040, what would be the proportion of people living in rural areas and engaged in agriculture?

Participants

Speakers

David B. Sandalow

Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy

Ms. Christine Loh

Chief Executive Officer, Civic Exchange, Hong Kong


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