Outdated and opaque administration stops Hong Kong from using land efficiently, think tank says

The way Hong Kong land is leased, managed and recorded is outdated, opaque and cumbersome, a city think tank has said, calling on officials to review the system.

Fragmented administration and decades-old laws were among problems preventing existing land from being used efficiently, the Hong Kong Policy Research Institute said on Sunday, even as the government hunts for new sources of land such as reclamation and building on golf courses.

“Without an efficient land administration system to effect land policies, land resources may be idle and misused or fall into uses which are illegal or in breach of lease, leading to a failure to release land with development potential in time,” the report read.

The study, conducted by the think tank of former Legislative Council president Jasper Tsang Yok-sing, looked at benchmarks set by the World Bank’s annual Doing Business report, which includes a section on land administration quality.

It also referenced parameters from other academic studies such as sustainable development and comprehensiveness of data.

Doreen Kong Yuk-foon, a research fellow at the institute, said the city’s land administration regime did well in international rankings, but was starting to falter on the “latest social needs”, especially on openness and accessibility of data.