Hong Kong’s economic transformation:
1960: Average per capita income in Hong Kong was 28 percent of Great Britain’s.
1996: Average per capita income in Hong Kong was 137 percent of Great Britain’s.
Most of us want to know the magic formula that takes people from poverty to wealth. So a one-question quiz: Guess what happened — select the correct answer:
(a) HK became socialist.
(b) HK enacted lots of tariffs.
(c) HK won the lottery.
(d) HK became free-market capitalist.
More on Hong Kong’s history: “The Man Behind the Hong Kong Miracle”. The source for the 28-to-137% statistic is Andrew Bernstein’s The Capitalist Manifesto, p. 326.