Macau cleans up its act
11/09/2008
The controversy surrounding the role of the special administrative region of Macau in China's leather footwear exports may be coming to an end.
At the end of April, the European Union moved to add Macau to the list of Asian countries (principally China and Vietnam), against which it will apply anti-dumping measures on imports of leather footwear. It claimed that, while Macau's imports of footwear from China in 2005 totalled 40,000 pairs, the figure in 2007 (after the measures came into place) jumped to 5.1 million. It said that China's use of Macau as a staging post for footwear exports was the only plausible explanation. The former Portuguese colony has a population of only 500,000.
However, new figures from the Macau Statistics and Census Bureau suggest that in the first half of this year footwear exports had "fallen sharply". With the economy there now mostly based on tourism, Macau's exports overall fell by 11% in value in the six-month period, while the value of imports increased by 7%.
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