ABSTRACT
The case of Hong Kong is a continuation of labor-intensive production in the context of fierce competition from other New Territories East in the region, rising production costs, and intensified protectionism from its export markets. The rapid growth of the manufacturing sector in the 1960s and 1970s was facilitated by heavy government involvement in infrastructural construction. The arrival of legal and illegal migrants from China since the mid-1970s had again, like previous waves of migration from the other side of the border, brought Hong Kong a new pool of low-wage labor for manufacturing production. As a consequence of the failure to achieve industrial upgrading in the 1970s, Hong Kong's manufacturing industries in the 1980s remained labor-intensive in character. The rising cost of labor and labor shortage have brought the Hong Kong government under tremendous pressure to consider seriously the call to import labor.
