Hong Kong land development and policy intensity: strategic embedding in a period of transition

Hong Kong’s development has long relied on a land-based model serving both fiscal and governance roles, but this approach is now undergoing major changes amid institutional and economic transition. This study introduces a novel computational approach to analyse how the government’s land policy intensity has evolved amid shifting fiscal priorities and developmental strategies. Using manually labelled sentences from Policy Addresses between 1997 and 2023, a fine-tuned large language model (ERNIE) identifies policy orientations related to land resource allocation, market regulation, and development – protection balance. The resulting policy intensity index has been employed in a time-series analysis to examine the dynamic relationship between policy efforts and land-related fiscal outcomes. The empirical findings reveal a strategic recalibration of Hong Kong’s land governance: intensified land policies significantly reduce the absolute magnitude of land revenue but do not alter its relative fiscal importance. This pattern reflects the government’s gradual shift from revenue maximization towards social welfare and sustainability objectives, while remaining constrained by deep institutional path dependency. The dynamic results further indicate a bidirectional causal relationship one year after the release of the annual Policy Addresses, policy dominance for two years, and the dissipation of effects three years and beyond.