(Sourced from South China Morning Post)
Hong Kong, already one of the world’s least affordable urban centres to live and work in, is also the costliest Asian city to get anything built, due to its severe shortage of construction labour, according to a survey by global design and architecture consultancy Arcadis.
Hong Kong’s registered construction workers numbered 427,609 as of January 2017, and their productivity and number of working days are declining, as 40% of registered workers are older than 50 years old, according to data by Hong Kong’s Construction Industry Alliance.
“The major reason is shortage of labour in Hong Kong, a persistent problem with no apparent and immediate solutions,” said Francis Au, Arcadis’ country head for Hong Kong and Macau, in releasing the International Construction Costs Index. “Solutions based on migrant labour aren’t acceptable to the local population at this stage. To stabilise the rising building costs, the government and the construction industry will have to look into investing in initiatives and solutions that can increase industrial productivity.”
List of cities with the highest construction costs in Asia (Source: SCMP)
Macau is Asia’s second-most expensive city for building because of the massive number of casinos under construction.
“We used to call those casinos money-printing machines,” Au said. Unlike Hong Kong, Macau can import construction workers from mainland China and Hong Kong, which goes some way to alleviating the labour shortage and cap the costs.
For the remainder of this year, Hong Kong’s construction industry workload can be sustained by upcoming mega projects such as the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge, and large housing programmes with 480,000 apartment units expected to be built over the next decade.
Construction on the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge. (Photo from The State Council of the People’s Republic of China)
Slower economic growth in China may cut construction costs by 2 to 3 percentage points, he said.
“As China’s state economic policy is to expand overseas, we can expect to see more Chinese funds go to other Asian countries such as the Philippines, Malaysia and Cambodia to fuel their infrastructure projects building,” he said.
Meanwhile, mainland China will be home to three of the world’s 10 costliest infrastructure projects of 2017, with the US$150 billion “One Belt, One Road” signature programme topping Arcadis’ survey.
Oh, and if you’re curious about the Western side of the world, San Francisco is still one of the most expensive cities to live in. After all, what do you expect when a run-down, uninhabitable shack selling for $350,000 is the cheapest property sold there?
The cost of living in the 20 most expensive cities in the world (2016) based on data from Numbeo. (Source: The Crazy Tourist)
