Hong Kong's fiscal largesse will fail to buy support

Significance

The budget aims to stimulate economic growth and help small businesses and lower-income residents by redistributing public funds amounting to 34 billion Hong Kong dollars (4.4 billion US dollars). Also prominent are measures intended to quell economic anxiety that helped fuel large pro-democracy protests that shut down parts of the city centre for nearly three months between September and December last year.

Impacts

• A cooling property market could relieve some economic frustration.
• Fears of investors fleeing Hong Kong are overplayed; the financial regime is entirely stable and there are few alternatives.
• Economic and political grievances will combine to feed an increasingly overt hostility to the mainland's government and citizens.
• The single most popular action the government could take would probably be to restrict mainland immigration, upsetting Beijing as a result.