Managing human capital in world cities: Reflections on Hong Kong developing into an education hub

In order to enhance national competitiveness in a globalized economy, a number of Asian governments (such as Malaysia and Singapore) have begun to adopt policies and strategies to develop education hubs, and the education industry. Despite its very close proximity to Mainland China, the world’s largest source country of overseas students (Kritz, 2006), Hong Kong has only since 2004 become proactive in building itself into a ‘regional education hub’ and developing its education industry. Although commonly regarded as one of the four newly industrialized economies alongside Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, Hong Kong has always been different from the others. It is not a typical ‘developmental state’ (Wade, 1990; Weiss, 1998; Woo-Cumings, 1999) where an elite bureaucracy focuses on economic objectives, plays a commanding role in taming domestic and international market forces and harnesses them to local ends. Hong Kong, instead, has always prided itself on having a small government which operates according to an economic philosophy of ‘positive non-interventionism’, where the government’s main role is to facilitate the functioning of the market, rather than assuming a directing role in the local economy.