This paper analyses the economy of Hong Kong mainly through the perspective of GDP, and then analyses its fiscal and monetary policies which are implemented by Hong Kong government and its Monetary Authority. Hong Kong is one of the world’s leading financial centers and it is an efficiency service-oriented free market economy. Hong Kong’s economic freedom score is 90.1 on a 100-point scale, making it the top-rated economy in the Index for the 20th consecutive year (Heritage.org, 2014). Hong Kong’s economy is normally characterized by its low taxation, light regulation and well established international trading environment. Current Position of Economy Diagram 1. The Hong Kong economy picked up to moderate growth in 2013 As the diagram above reveals, in the past 5 years, Hong Kong’s economic performance experienced two major declines. The worse one was during the Subprime Mortgage Crisis started from 2007, Hong Kong’s rate of change in real terms decreased significantly compared to its growth trend in the previous years. However, compared to the other countries, such as the US and UK, it was less cyclical affected and the recovery in Hong Kong economy had a better performance. Another decline occurred in the year of 2012, after few years of the recession, and the reasons of that down-slope will be provided below. According to Diagram 1, Hong Kong’s economic performance has kept a gradual growth in the year of 2013, with real GDP expanding moderately by 2.9%, up from 1.5% in 2012, keeping the labour market in a state of full employment (Hong Kong Economy Report, 2014). As a whole, in year 2013 both the external and internal sector of Hong Kong performed better than the year of 2012. With regards to the overseas sector, total ex... ... middle of paper ... ...ion of RMB. Under the situation of RMB continuous gains value and HKD loses value, people in Hong Kong lose their confidence in HKD. Thus, stabilization the exchange rate of HKD/RMB is needed, for example, adjustable peg policy, which would help relief the pressure on HKD. Conclusion To sum up, Hong Kong unloaded the recession quickly and its economy maintained a positive trend after 2012. The latest fiscal and monetary policies carried out by Hong Kong government and Monetary Authority promoted its economic development through stimulating the investment and consumption as well as stabilising the price level. It is suggested that Hong Kong should increase the tax from the rich to reduce the gap of wealth and distinguish the rich and the poor in expansion and contraction of the fiscal policies and adjust the peg policy of monetary policy to achieve maximum results.
Just as the great depression, a booming economy had been experienced before the global financial crisis. The economy was growing at a faster rtae bwteen 2001 and 2007 than in any other period in the last 30 years (wade 2008 p23). An vast amount of subprime mortgages were the backbone to the financial collapse, among several other underlying issues. As with the great depression, there would be a number of factors that caused such a devastating economic
Furthermore, Jeremy Rifkin writes “The Age of Reason is being eclipsed by the Age of Empathy,”(qtd. in Huffington 551). As the years go by, the sign of empathy within humans increase. The increase of empathy is valuable but, there is not reason behind the empathy. Rifkin makes the case that
Especially with the human body and the brain there are so many intricate connections and cooperating systems that isolating one sensations (empathy) and the effect it has on the brain becomes a highly technical adventure. However the author’s attacked much of the content with a high level of precision. What helped a layman such as I understand the text more thoroughly were the case studies that the authors included which gave first hand experience of empathy in animals and humans. There were two prominent ones, one that detailed the interactions between rats and mice when presented with painful stimuli or encountering others with painful stimuli. The second was the human version of this. The messages of both of these studies were that empathy activated a certain part of the brain (medial preoptic area) that created involuntary aversive responses to said stimuli. While the technical explanation of this phenomenon gave the reader a profuse understanding of the concept of empathy, the anecdotal evidence helps support the empirical. The authors don’t ask us to ponder much in terms of the philosophical implications of empathy. This paper is purely technical and doesn’t delve much into the social machinations of empathy and how choosing to display or not to display empathy has an impact on society. Of course these are questions that the
American psychologist Carl Rogers first introduced the meaning behind empathy and its importance in the health care profession. He defined empathy as “to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person, but without ever losing the “as if” condition” (reference). Empathy encompasses the person as a whole, and having the ability to engross one self into the individual 's perspective while maintaining your own emotions in check (reference). Many theorists have attempted to analyze this concept from many different angles such as, Hoffman (1981) argued that the body responded in a natural way and as a largely involuntary vicarious response to affective cues from another person. For example, when viewing facial distress during an encounter the body may respond with similar feedback producing matching emotional occurrence (Decety & Jackson, 2015?). This could be interpreted as a role of autonomic function that is vital to “cognitive functions and emotion regulation” (Decety & Jackson, 2015) thus, not even being aware that empathy is being displayed. While others such as Batson et al (1997) referred to cognitive resources being utilized in role taking
Humans have almost always had the ability to feel what each other is feeling. However, empathy is a relatively new term that stems from the German word Einfühlung. By the 19th century, most humans were starting to become aware of this aspect of human nature that compassionate and perspective-taking come from, according to the book “Empathy and Its Development”. There are two types of empathy: affective and cognitive. Affective empathy refers to our despondence to other people’s mental state, such as feeling sympathy when seeing a starving child on television. Cognitive Empathy is human’s ability to understand different perspectives and mental states. Rather than helping for the sake of self-interest or heroic recognition, scientists now argue that both forms of empathy are an integral part to humanity. Without empathy, it would be challenging to relate to others, thus dehumanizing others and promoting the causes for violence. In the Ted Talk “The Empathic Civilization”, Jeremy Rifkin states, “All humans are soft-wired with mirror neurons so that, if I 'm observing you, your anger, your frustration, your sense of rejection, your joy, whatever it is, and I can feel what you 're doing, the same neurons will light up in me as if I 'm having that experience myself”. The biological reasoning behind this social aspect of human nature reveals that
Despite the fact that recent reports have shown that the Chinese currency is currently facing descending pressures, it is, however, likely to improve in the future because of the enhanced terms of trade, current account surplus that is growing, and high net saving. Another reason that will make the Chinese RMB to do well in the future it is because the currency has solid fundamentals and the economy of the country is significantly increasing at a higher rate than the GDP rates. Due to the growing Chinese economy to being the second largest economy, the Chinese currency yuan has been acknowledged by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a major global
Xingzhong, LI Daokui David YIN. "The International Monetary System in the Era of Post-Financial Crisis: What Policy Options Does China Have?[J]." Journal of Financial Research 2 (2010): 005
Empathy is the ‘capacity’ to share and understand another person’s ‘state of mind’ or their emotion. It is an experience of the outlook on emotions of another person being within themselves (Ioannides & Konstantikaki, 2008). There are two different types of empathy: affective empathy and cognitive empathy. Affective empathy is the capacity in which a person can respond to another person’s emotional state using the right type of emotion. On the other hand, cognitive empathy is a person’s capacity to understand what someone else is feeling. (Rogers, Dziobek, Hassenstab, Wolf & Convit, 2006). This essay will look at explaining how biology and individual differences help us to understand empathy as a complex, multi-dimensional trait.
It is commonly thought of as the ability to understand another person’s feelings, or put yourself in their shoes. Rodgers’ defines empathy as, “The state of empathy, or being empathic, is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person, but without ever losing the 'as if’ condition. Thus it means to sense the hurt or the pleasure of another as he senses it and to perceive the causes thereof as he perceives them, but without ever losing the recognition that it is as if I were hurt or pleased and so forth. It this 'as if ' quality is lost, then the state is one of identification”(Rodgers, 1959). The “as if” quality here is the experience of understanding the condition of someone else. Rodgers is saying that, an experience has to be felt by the empathizer, or else the situation is just identifying the person’s condition(Rodgers,
Empathy is biased in many ways because connecting can others can seem hard if they are nothing like us. We might try to denying this, but “recent studies have shown
Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s position and to intuit what that person is feeling (Pink, 2006). Rather than simply sympathizing, empathy enables us to put ourselves into the shoes of another and actually feel what they are feeling. This vicarious sense allows us to better understand people and their experiences. Understanding others and their experiences is vital in education. Whether dealing with different races, religions, sexes, etc., empathy provides us with an avenue to widespread understanding of others that even language cannot.
Empathy, at the turn of the century, was described as a “unique combination of cognitive effort and bodily feeling, thought to characterize aesthetic feelings,” and had been described as so for many years, much like, sympathy. Empathy, however, broke off from the word sympathy and has since been deemed differently as, “moral activity and a more specific physio-psychological process in how our brain is hardwired,” but empathy and sympathy are still thought to share key features in the 20th century, and society couldn’t be more wrong in using the word empathy so loosely. Sympathy is merely and understanding of one’s emotional state, where empathy is the extreme sense, awareness, and feeling of another’s emotional
For the forecast, the PBC will adapt to the dynamic economic environment, to ensure the policies continuity and stability, maintain the prudent monetary policy and continuing a moderate elastic scope (China Monetary Policy Report 2015). In addition, Chinese government will remain a more proactive fiscal policy. They will moderately increase the financial deficit and preparing to make the biggest reform in the policy and avoiding the fiscal cliff, especially focus on the tax system and expand the effectiveness of government’s expenditure (Cevik and Carolina-Caro 2015). Meanwhile, China will strengthen the coordinate of monetary and fiscal policies, which stabilizing the Chinese economic
During the twentieth century, the world began to develop the idea of economic trade. Beginning in the 1960’s, the four Asian Tigers, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, demonstrated that a global economy, which was fueled by an import and export system with other countries, allowed the economy of the home country itself to flourish. Th...
In addition, after the 2011 Singapore general election, the government of Singapore has greatly changed its economic approach and it seems to be better for the economy of Singapore so far. On the other hand, measures have also been taken to cool down the property market which has constantly affected inflation rates, also tightened the foreign labour policies that constantly influence the labour market and unfold its impacts onto the Singapore’s economy as it comes back in one round. The unemployment rate in Singapore has been maintaining itself as being one of the lowest numbers in the world. The majority of Singapore’s labour force is well educated and highly skilled. Even primary education is a must for all citizens (Economywatch.com, 2010). In addition, for the year 2010, Singapore had the 8th largest current account balance in the world at US$49.454 billion. To conclude, Singapore has come so far from its sunken economy since independence in 1965 to become a booming and prosperous economy that it is