Competitive Potential in Clothing Exports for Hong Kong and the Interior of China

Hong Kong and the Interior of China are leading clothing exporters in the world. Together they accounted for nearly 29 percent of the global clothing exports in 1999. The paper is basically divided into two parts. Firstly, it discusses that high world market share is an indicator of competitiveness for the product. From United Nations statistics, it was identified that Hong Kong and the Interior of China were competitive in certain discrete clothing items and a trend was apparent in the production shift of labour intensive clothing items from Hong Kong to the Mainland as witnessed from 1987-1993. With the revised statistical classification system in clothing items released by United Nations, second part of the paper further investigates the broad clothing categories of knitted and woven garments from 1987-1998. It was discovered that Hong Kong was traditionally more competitive hi knitted garments while the Interior of China possessed advantages hi the manufacture of woven items. Taking the labour cost

Competitive Potential in Clothing Exports for Hong Kong and the Interior of China

Hong Kong and the Interior of China are leading clothing exporters in the world. Together they accounted for nearly 29 percent of the global clothing exports in 1999. The paper is basically divided into two parts. Firstly, it discusses that high world market share is an indicator of competitiveness for the product. From United Nations statistics, it was identified that Hong Kong and the Interior of China were competitive in certain discrete clothing items and a trend was apparent in the production shift of labour intensive clothing items from Hong Kong to the Mainland as witnessed from 1987-1993. With the revised statistical classification system in clothing items released by United Nations, second part of the paper further investigates the broad clothing categories of knitted and woven garments from 1987-1998. It was discovered that Hong Kong was traditionally more competitive hi knitted garments while the Interior of China possessed advantages hi the manufacture of woven items. Taking the labour cost advantage of the Interior of China and the marketing strengths of Hong Kong, their co-operation for clothing production is considered complementary to each other and able to foster synergistic effects.