This week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Finance Ministerial Meeting was significant in terms of shaping the region’s economic development. Progress achieved during the one-and-a-half-day meeting will certainly contribute to fruitful policy discussions at the 33rd APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting to be held in Shenzhen next month.
Since its creation in Canberra, Australia, in 1989, APEC has facilitated regional engagement and accommodated political differences. APEC governance involves multilevel exchanges among leaders, ministers/representatives, senior officials, committees, and working groups. Cross-sector partnership is facilitated by the formation of the APEC Business Advisory Council, with representation of business executives from each member economy. Recently, APEC has turned toward coordinating the financial system with structural reform amid an economy that’s increasingly driven by artificial intelligence and rapidly changing regional demographics.
As APEC approaches the end of four decades of regional cooperation, recent assessments have identified policy challenges in member economies. To promote stable growth in the world’s two largest economies in APEC, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said recently that Chinese consumers need to spend more, those in the United States have to save more, and Europeans have to invest more. APEC’s 2025 economic policy report identified several root causes for economic uncertainty, including inadequate development in human capital, limited access to financial services and markets, and weak governing institutions. Lack of serious efforts to address these challenges will undermine the path toward common prosperity, the key theme of the 2026 APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting.
As a member of APEC since 1991, Hong Kong is ideally placed to offer collaborative solutions to two sets of common challenges in the region.
First, Hong Kong is well situated to enhance human capital in APEC member economies. With five universities ranked among the world’s top 100 and the creation of its third medical school, Hong Kong offers strong options in a wide range of rigorous academic and professional programs to students throughout the APEC region. Hong Kong’s first five-year plan aims to allocate over 1,000 hectares to develop three new university towns in the Northern Metropolis, with each integrally linked to signature areas of growth such as health technology, smart manufacturing, and other emerging industries. Talent development lies at the core of these communities. In the next few years, the Northern Metropolis will be transformed into an international education hub and a multifaceted global center of innovation and public-private partnerships. To promote the city as the top choice for education and workforce development across APEC’s diverse economies, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government needs to address the issue of access and affordability. The government could expand its Belt and Road Scholarship program to enable 10,000 young people from APEC developing economies to study in the city in the next few years. Using both merit and affordability as criteria, the program could offer undergraduate and postgraduate scholarships to young people from Chile, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Thailand, and Vietnam, among others. In receiving the scholarship, students would agree to return to their home economies to work. Currently, APEC’s developing economies have an average of less than 10 years of schooling, compared to over 13 years in their industrialized peers. The targeted scholarship arrangement promises to narrow this gap as well as to address the growing demand for quality education in developing economies.
Second, Hong Kong can collaborate with other APEC economies to strengthen firms and government access to financial capital for growth. In the June 2025 World Bank Enterprise Surveys, firms in APEC developing economies said they had encountered serious problems in obtaining financial capital. In response, in October 2025, APEC finance chiefs launched the Incheon Plan, a framework designed to enable member-specific actions to improve financial resilience, promote transparent and sustainable fiscal frameworks, and strengthen access to financial capital. An effective flow of financial capital for business operations is a key contributing factor to job creation. However, a sound financial system remains a work in progress in some APEC economies. Indonesia’s stock market recently fell precipitously in a single trading session after the global index provider MSCI Inc proposed to double-downgrade the country directly from “emerging market” to “stand-alone market” status. As a global leader in cross-boundary wealth management and an international financial center, Hong Kong can offer APEC economies high-quality core financial services and a range of “finance+” services, including IP, risk management, and insurance.
Hong Kong continues to gather momentum in financial capability. The Fraser Institute Economic Freedom of the World 2026 Annual Report ranked the city first globally out of 165 jurisdictions, maintaining its top spot in “freedom to trade” internationally and second in regulation. There is increasingly positive business sentiment, according to recent surveys conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. Almost 80 percent of US firms surveyed said they see Hong Kong as a competitive international business hub in Asia and have no intention of relocating their headquarters. They value Hong Kong’s separate customs zone status, zero-tariff free-port environment, simple tax system, and common law framework.
Hong Kong’s financial and human capital strategies can be readily translated into concrete courses of actions to support developing economies in APEC to get on a path toward sustainable economic growth. Hong Kong’s strategic move to strengthen human capital pipelines and financial capabilities in APEC developing economies will be in line with the theme, “Building an Asia-Pacific Community to Prosper Together”, at the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Shenzhen in November.
The author is the Kerry Group professor in public policy, and director of the School of Governance and Policy at the University of Hong Kong.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
