THE OFFSHORE DIRECT INVESTMENT OF HONG KONG CLOTHING FIRMS

Hong Kong clothing firms have invested overseas from as early as the late 1950s in order to evade or minimise the impact of quantitative restrictions for export to developed countries. Under global trading and production involvement, the Offshore Direct Investment (ODI) activities of Hong Kong clothing firms have actually spread and penetrated into the clothing industry of different continents in the world. This paper studies empirically on Dunning's eclectic model for the offshore investment of Hong Kong clothing firms with emphasis on the rationale behind the shift and the locations chosen for initial and recent investments.     

A Model Fitting Approach to Depict the Global Textile Trade

Since the mercantilism era, economists have built up trade theories to explain the rationale and patterns of world trade.In this paper, the explanatory power of the international product life cycle (IPLC) theory for describing the trends and patterns of the global textile trade, one of the most geographically dispersed export items in both developed and developing countries/regions, is discussed. Data at SITC two-digit level (SITC 65) were collected and time series regressions were performed to analyze the value trends and world shares of textile exports from 1990 to 2000 for selected developed economies. It was found that some developed economies have increased their world shares in textile exports, which indicated that global trade shift in the textile industry may not follow what the IPLC has suggested.     

Integrated Knitwear Production for Hong Kong and the Interior of China

Hong Kong knitwear manufacturers were among the pioneers to invest in the Pearl River Delta region of Guang-dong,China.Owing to limitations on technological levelat the time of the initial investments,the content of pro-duction-sharing for the Inland in China were basically of simple technology and labour intensive in nature.Through venturing hardships,the investment has been able to boost the economy of Guangdong and foster close trade relationship,especially in outward processing trade,By now,the co-operative production between     

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