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The implicit assumption underlying the work of most anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) is that they need to change public attitudes toward corruption to ensure a cleaner future. The means of achieving this objective usually rest on sanctions, prevention, and sermons. Changing attitudes is seen to be largely a matter of prosecuting the corrupt, putting preventive measures in place, emphasizing the negative social and criminal consequences of corruption, and exhorting the public to achieve higher moral standards. Engaging the public is rarely undertaken directly. If it were, it would entail a community relations approach based on face-to-face, decentralized interaction between the ACA and the public. In principle, this approach might have three significant advantages. First, it could enable the anti-corruption message to be communicated more directly and, possibly, more effectively. Second, it might assist the ACA in identifying groups within the community which have developed, or are developing, attitudes which are potentially antithetical to its objectives. Third, it could serve as a springboard for local anti-corruption initiatives which might help to embed desired practices in the community or groups within it. In this chapter, we examine the extent to which one of the few agencies to adopt a full-blown community relations strategy – Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) – has been able to achieve those benefits.

This chapter examines the role and importance of leadership in public management reform through the experience of Hong Kong. It aims to identify the gap between leadership in public organizations and public management reform in both theory and research and to make recommendations on how the gap can be bridged, particularly under the Asian context. It is a major irony that while both leadership and public management reform have a common concern of fostering positive change in public organizations, these two streams of research are separated, incompatible, and even conflicting. While leadership study is influenced by disciplines such as the psychology and emphasizes a multifaceted approach, most public management reforms are based on the New Public Management (NPM) model which is economics-oriented and structure-driven. Through studying the role of leadership in the public management reform in Hong Kong, it is argued the hollowing-out of leadership in reform is often one of the leading causes for the failure to achieve the expected outcomes. This chapter will elaborate its argument in the following sequence. First, it will review the generic literature on leadership to highlight the importance and relevancy of leadership for public organizations. Second, it will point out the leadership crisis in public management reform caused by the dominance of the NPM model. Finally, it will discuss the negative impact of the hollowing-out of leadership on public management reform and how this problem should be tackled.

In this chapter I trace the evolution of Hong Kong's political and administrative systems from one dominated by the bureaucracy to one dominated by the political executive. The change has had profound consequences for governance arrangements in Hong Kong and on reform capacity. I illustrate the impact of the change on the institutional arrangements in one policy domain, food safety.

The Dim Sum bond market in Hong Kong, which allows China to regulate the amount of offshore yuans that flow back into the mainland, has grown steadily since its inception in 2007 and is expected to surpass in 2013 the threshold level that would attract insurers and long-term issuers to the market. Yet, the market has not matured sufficiently relative to the yuan deposit market in Hong Kong that has grown at a much faster pace on account of trade liberalization and the use of yuans in China’s international trade settlements. Even though Hong Kong has fulfilled its role as an offshore currency center for the yuan, it is being challenged by Taiwan, Singapore, and London in terms of being the premier location for the issuance of yuan-denominated bonds outside of Mainland China.

The study investigates the interdependence of the stock markets between the following countries Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and the advanced stock markets of Australia, Germany, United Kingdom and the United States. Using data from 1994 to 2003 the paper employs both correlation, causality and cointegration analysis to describe the behaviour of the above stock market indices over the period pre and post the 1997 Asian Financial Crises. The paper investigates both the short- and long-run relationships between the Asian markets and the markets of selected advanced industrial countries.

Despite an intensified anti-corruption campaign, China's economic growth and social transition continue to breed loopholes and opportunities for big corruption, leading to a money-oriented mentality and the collapse of ethical standards, and exposing the communist regime to greater risk of losing moral credibility and political trust. In Hong Kong, the setting up of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 1974 marked the advent of a new comprehensive strategy to eradicate corruption and to rebuild trust in government. The ICAC was not just an anti-corruption enforcement agency per se, but an institution spearheading and representing integrity and governance transformation. This chapter considers how mainland China can learn from Hong Kong's experience and use the fight against corruption as a major political strategy to win the hearts and minds of the population and reform governance in the absence of more fundamental constitutional reforms, in a situation similar to Hong Kong's colonial administration of the 1970s–1980s deploying administrative means to minimize a political crisis.

The current work studies the cause, process, and effects of financial reform in 10 countries in Eastern Asia for the period of 1993–2002, especially focusing upon comparisons between pre- and post-Asia financial crisis. This study utilizes Mann–Whitney U test and Intervention Analysis to explore the different effects of the changes of GDP, stock index, exchange rate, CPI index, and the changes of the unemployment rate before and after the Asia financial crisis. It shows the consistent relationship between stock index, exchange rate, CPI index, and the changes of unemployment rate.

The study discussed in this article examines two empirical questions: (1) Can multiple financial signals enhance the intermediate-horizon returns of value and glamour investments on Asian stock markets? and (2) Do the return enhancements, if any, differ by value and growth firm types and vary across different markets? The results of this study show that financial signals affect return enhancements, and these enhancements differ by firm types and vary across markets. These differences can be explained by non-positive value premiums and relatively poor information quality documented on Asian markets.

In late April 1973, Charles P. Sutcliffe, the Commissioner of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force (RHKPF), received confidential information that Chief Superintendent Peter F. Godber, Deputy District Police Commander for Kowloon, was remitting money abroad. This information was transmitted to James J. E. Morrin, the Director of the Anti-Corruption Office (ACO), for investigation. By the end of May 1973, investigations by the ACO officers revealed that Godber had deposited in Hong Kong banks or remitted overseas HK$650,000 (US$128,332) since 1968 (Blair-Kerr, 1973a, pp. 3–4).