Hong Kong workers gravitating to Macau

2014/8/12

From:Macau Business Daily

In the second quarter, Macau welcomed 1,500 new workers from Hong Kong, a record increase of 20 percent from the previous quarter. The fourth largest foreign community in Macau is growing threes times faster the non-resident worker population, outpacing mainlanders and Filipinos

The number of Hong Kong residents working in Macau is skyrocketing. They’re growing three times faster than the non-resident population who work here and more than mainlanders, Filipinos or Vietnamese, official statistics revealed yesterday.
In only three months, Macau has admitted more than 1,500 new workers from Hong Kong, who today are the fourth largest non-resident population in Macau.
According to the Statistics and Census Bureau, the number of Hong Kong residents working in Macau grew 19.7 percent in the second quarter of this year to a total of 8,178 individuals. In the first quarter, Macau recorded 7,194 Hong Kong residents working here. It was, by far, the foreign community to register the highest growth.
In the April-June period, non-resident workers in Macau increased by 6.6 percent compared to the first quarter. The economy here got a boost in the labour force of around 10,000 people in the second quarter. The territory now supports 155,000 non-resident workers, a quarter of Macau’s total population (645,000 at the end of the second quarter).
Of the foreign workforce, mainlanders account for the majority with almost two thirds in June (64.3 percent) followed by Filipinos (13 percent) and Vietnamese (8.2 percent). Hong Kongers follow in fourth place with a share of 5.5 percent albeit with the greatest quarterly growth. The Chinese labour community in Macau went up 8.2 percent, while Filipinos and Vietnamese remained more or less flat with a slight increase of one percent in the second quarter.
The flow of Hong Kong workers coming to Macau happens at the same time that the territory sees a record number of companies being created here. In the second quarter, Macau’s economy incorporated 1,454 new businesses, 30 percent more than a year before. Theses companies also attracted a record amount of capital to Macau – 1.1 billion patacas – registering six times more than the same quarter last year.
The statistics bureau also revealed that Macau’s population continues to grow at soft rates. In the second quarter some 624,000 people were living here, 1.5 percent more than in the first quarter (615,000) and 5.5 percent more than a year before. Live births increased 1.8 percent in the last quarter, while the mortality rate declined 13.8 percent. With a growth of 6.6 percent quarter-on-quarter, non-resident workers continue to outpace the overall population, increasing fourfold.
In the first half of the year, 594 illegal Chinese immigrants were repatriated from Macau, the statistics office announced yesterday. Compared to the same quarter last year, deportations decreased by 3.1 percent. More than half of repatriations (305) happened in the second quarter. The majority of illegals from the mainland were individuals aged between 30 and 39 years old haling from Guangdong Province.

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