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The first Hong Kong Real Estate Investment Trust (HK‐REIT), the Link REIT, was successfully launched in late 2005. The retail tranche of its initial public offering (IPO) was 19 times oversubscribed, and the IPO is the largest of its kind in the world until now. Despite the initial phenomenon success, there have been only three others to follow and get listed. Indeed, it took Hong Kong over two years to have her first Link REIT listed after the legislation for REIT products had come into force. The development of REIT market in Hong Kong has been slow compared to its counterparts in some other Asian countries. This paper aims to explain the somewhat sluggish growth of the HK‐REIT market. Its development is compared with some emerging Asian markets as well as the more mature markets in the USA and Australia. The study is focused on the legislations that govern REITs in different jurisdictions, their different REIT market envi‐ronments and the rationale from the respective governments to introduce their REITs. It is concluded that the sluggish development of HK‐REITs is mainly due to its market environment and industry structure. There is not enough incentive for developers to dispose their assets in the form of REITs. Besides, the HK‐REIT Code was initially criticized by the industry as being too restrictive. Though subsequent amendments on the HK‐REIT Code have been made to make it more conducive to the development of REIT market, further sustainable success will however hinge on the willingness from sponsors, particularly large developers, to offer their portfolios of properties for sale through REITs.

Manpower is the most valuable asset in the construction industry. Based on an examination of literature, selected key data sources, and views from 29 key informants, this paper addresses the important labour resource context related to the construction industry in the case of Hong Kong. These include the trends of the critical indicators of the labour market in construction and the implications of the changing markets and technology on the future pattern of skill requirements, and the government policies on construction personnel. The findings are of immense importance to anyone involved in the construction industry, particularly training organizations and policy makers in their mission to maintain a skilled, competitive and adequate workforce able to meet the future demands of the industry. The changing labour market trends and skill requirements pose challenges for construction personnel in terms of upgrading their skills. Further research is recommended to construct robust models predicting the occupational trends in labour resources for effective manpower planning and to establish a labour market information system which could lead to capturing periodic labour market signals with a view to assisting the process of policy making on various human resource development aspects of construction workforce in Hong Kong.

The construction industry plays a significant role to the economy of Hong Kong not only in terms of output but also the employment. The sector, however, has been severely hit by the economic downturn in recent years resulting in serious unemployment. Employment planning becomes one of the critical aspects for the recovery of the economy. The main objective of this paper is to establish a labour demand model for the Hong Kong construction industry. The unique characteristics and the current conditions of the construction labour market are reviewed. Regression analysis based on 123 construction projects was used to compute the relationship between expenditure and site workers employed. The best predictor of average labour demand of construction projects in Hong Kong is found to be DL = 463 C 0.934, where DL is the actual labour demand in man‐days, C is the final cost of contract in millions. The labour demand‐cost relationship can be applied as a manpower forecasting model to estimate the total labour required for a given type of project. The developed model enables a more reliable and accurate planning of manpower requirements in the construction industry.

Efficient manpower planning has been recognized as a critical aspect for the development of an economy. In 2001, the Works Bureau of the Hong Kong SAR Government (predecessor of Environment, Transport and Works Bureau) commissioned an HKPolyU consultancy team to develop a computer‐based model to estimate the demand for different categories of construction personnel. This article presents the concept and features of the manpower demand‐forecasting model developed for the construction industry of Hong Kong. The forecasting model is formulated on the basis of the labour multiplier approach by deriving the relationship between the number of workers required and the project expenditure in the given project duration. Multipliers for 61 project types were derived for 38 labour trades using completed project data. The labour demand by occupation for each project can then be estimated by multiplying the corresponding multipliers and the estimated project expenditure. Several unique features of the model have been developed, including “normalization” and “contract cost adjustment factor”. Normalizing the labour multipliers can facilitate the prediction of occupational labour requirements at different stages of a construction project. The adjustment factor is introduced to eliminate the discrepancy between the original estimates and final contract values so as to enhance the estimation accuracy. The model can also be used to predict the number of jobs created for a given level of investment. The government can apply this model to check and compare which project types will generate most jobs before committing public money. This model could be easily adopted and adapted by foreign construction authorities while planning manpower.

This paper investigates the impact of a change in economic policy uncertainty (ΔEPUt) and the absolute value of a change in geopolitical risk (|ΔGPRt|) on the returns of stocks, bonds and gold in the Chinese market.

The paper uses Engle's (2009) dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) model and Chiang's (1988) rolling correlation model to generate correlations of asset returns over time and analyzes their responses to (ΔEPUt) and  |ΔGPRt|.

Evidence shows that stock-bond return correlations are negatively correlated to ΔEPUt, whereas stock-gold return correlations are positively related to the |ΔGPRt|, but negatively correlated with ΔEPUt. This study finds evidence that stock returns are adversely related to the risk/uncertainty measured by downside risk,  ΔEPUt and  |ΔGPRt|, whereas the bond return is positively related to a rise in ΔEPUt; the gold return is positively correlated with a heightened |ΔGPRt|.

The findings are based entirely on the data for China's asset markets; further research may expand this analysis to other emerging markets, depending on the availability of GPR indices.

Evidence suggests that the performance of the Chinese market differs from advanced markets. This study shows that gold is a safe haven and can be viewed as an asset to hedge against policy uncertainty and geopolitical risk in Chinese financial markets.

This study identify the special role for the gold prices in response to the economic policy uncertainty and the geopolitical risk. Evidence shows that stock and bond return correlation is negatively related to the ΔEPU and support the flight-to-quality hypothesis. However, the stock-gold return correlation is positively related to |ΔGPR|, resulting from the income or wealth effect.

The presence of a dynamic correlations between stock-bond and stock-gold relations in response to  ΔEPUt and  |ΔGPRt| has not previously been tested in the literature. Moreover, this study finds evidence that bond-gold correlations are negatively correlated to both ΔEPUt and  |ΔGPRt|.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a few leading Hong Kong construction firms are also efficient contractors. Theoretically, market leaders can exploit the virtue of economy of scale, learning curve and cost leadership to consolidate their competitiveness. However, if market share is key success factor for firms to become and stay competitive, smaller contractors will be further marginalized if the construction market continues to shrink as Hong Kong's economy approaches maturity. Hence the research question is: Have a few leading contractors been taking advantage of their market size to be efficient in Hong Kong?

Based on the Data Envelopment Analysis Assurance Region (DEA_AR) model, the efficiency scores of 17 major Hong Kong contractors are compiled over the last ten years. DEA is a non‐parametric approach to examine the relative efficiency among different firms, in terms of output/input ratios. Unlike traditional I‐O analysis which relies on a static table of coefficients, DEA does not require any priori and usually subjective weights for inputs or outputs.

The results identify efficient contractors, among which the three leading ones (China State Construction, Shui On Construction and Yau Lee Holdings) have captured the majority of housing construction contract values. Nevertheless, only China State Construction has ranked consistently as most efficient over time. The efficiency scores of Shui On Construction have decreased successively from 2002 to 2009, and it has been the least efficient contractor from 2006 to 2009. Yau Lee Holdings has a V‐curve of efficiency scores.

This study represents the first attempt to adopt a DEA_AR model to evaluate construction contractors' efficiency, which reduces the number of zeroes and the variation in weights for estimation and enhances the adequacy for individual contractor's efficiency scores, compared to other types of DEA models such as the CCR model and the BCC model.

This paper investigates the private housing in Hong Kong in terms of flexibility. Since the last few decades Hong Kong Government is steadily endeavoring to achieve a sustained and healthy development of private housing property market. With Hong Kong's economy on the rise, and its fertility rate being one of the lowest in the world, more people are looking for increased space standards even for higher price. Currently, around two-third of the population of Hong Kong lives in private flats. However, it is observed that these flats, especially the highrise housing estates do not come as open shell like the public housing estates do. This paper at first identifies the major prototypes of contemporary private housings built in the past few decades. Then it compares the flexibility of different prototypes in four sequential levels of construction i.e structure, envelop, building services and infill. Flexibility is measured by means of potential layout options that the users practice inside these prototypes. It finds that some prototypes offer more flexibility than the others. It concludes that flexibility in recent private flats is gradually reducing. But on a positive note, they are offering more varieties in size and layout design in order to meet the increasing demand in spatial standards.

This paper aims to explore the use of the data envelopment analysis (DEA), Cobb-Douglas and translog production function methods in estimating contractors’ efficiency.

In this paper, the DEA, translog and Cobb-Douglas methods were used to estimate the technical efficiency of 23 contractors in Hong Kong from 2003 to 2009. For this research, four input and three output variables were identified.

The results suggest that the efficiency scores obtained from the DEA method were significantly different from those obtained from the translog and Cobb-Douglas methods, while the efficiency scores from the translog method were similar to those from the Cobb-Douglas method. The DEA method further reveals that the company had poor utilisation of its resources over the past few years. On the output side, the current ratio was too small, implying that the company suffered from excess current liabilities relative to its current assets.

Application of efficiency measurement in the built environment is still in its infancy. The current research, therefore, calls for more research to be undertaken to establish the applied literature base for the construction industry.

The DEA method helps the inefficient company explore ways to improve the utilisation of the inputs as well as the process and to maximise the outputs.

Knowing the relative performance of contractors helps understand their competitiveness in the construction industry. By estimating their technical efficiency, contractors can improve the conditions for enhancing performance.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and predict the housing prices in Petaling district, Malaysia and its six sub-regions with a set of housing attributes using functional relationship model.

A new multiple unreplicated linear functional relationship model with both the response and explanatory variables are subject to errors is proposed. A total of 41,750 housing transacted records from November 2008 to February 2016 were used in this study. These data were divided into 70% training and 30% testing sets for each of the selected sub-regions. Individual housing price was regressed on nine housing attributes.

The results showed the proposed model has better fitting ability and prediction accuracy as compared to the hedonic model or multiple linear regression. The proposed model achieved at least 20% and 40% of predictions that have less than 5% and 10% deviations from the actual transacted housing prices, respectively. House buyers in these sub-regions showed similar preferences on most of the housing attributes, except for residents in Shah Alam who preferred to stay far away from shopping malls, and leasehold houses in Sri Kembangan are more valuable. From the h-nearest houses indicator, it is concluded that the housing market in Sungai Buloh is the most volatile in Petaling District.

As the data used are the actual housing transaction records in Petaling District, it represents only a segment of Malaysian urban population. The result will not be generalized to the entire Malaysian population.

This study is expected to provide insights to policymakers, property developers and investors to understand the volatility of the housing market and the influence of determinants in different sub-regions. The potential house buyers could also use the model to determine if a house is overpriced.

This study introduces measurement errors into the housing attributes to provide a more reliable analysis tool for the housing market. This study is the first housing research in Malaysia that used a large number of actual housing transaction records. Previous studies relied on small survey samples.

The purpose of this study is to present and compare the productive efficiency of China Mainland and China Hong Kong contractors, and to identify and investigate the components and sources of their efficiency under different economic and institutional environments.

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a non‐parametric approach to examine the relative efficiency among different firms. This study employs DEA based Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI) to compile the efficiency scores of 20 construction companies listed in the Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing Limited (HKEx) from 2004 to 2010.

A decomposition of MPI suggests that catch‐up effect has contributed more to contractor's efficiency than frontier‐shift effect. Compared to their Mainland counterparts, Hong Kong contractors have higher MPI mainly due to higher efficiency scores in catch‐up effect.

Hong Kong contractors have advantage over Mainland contractors in their managerial and strategic capabilities. Hence Hong Kong contractors should lever on their managerial expertise in accounting, financing and legal services when exporting their services. Meanwhile, Mainland contractors should improve their efficiency by making the most use of their technological and human resources, thus improving upon their international entrepreneurship.

This study is the first attempt to apply MPI to compare the productive efficiency of listed contractors in China Mainland and China Hong Kong. The findings contribute to the body of knowledge for productive efficiency measurement.