In the wake of Hong Kong’s slower-than-expected post-pandemic economic recovery, its deficit has become a major concern for society. Notably, fiscal reserves have plummeted from their peak of HK$1,211.0 billion in January 2019 to a mere HK$670.7 billion by November 2023. This stark decline raises critical questions: How severe is this financial downturn, and what steps can be taken to mitigate it? Addressing these inquiries requires a comprehensive analysis of Hong Kong’s fiscal performance over the long term.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of publicly accessible datasets or visualisations that provide a long-term perspective on Hong Kong’s financial health.

To facilitate informed discussions on Hong Kong’s fiscal policy, I initiated a project on GitHub aimed at creating and visualising a dataset which contains Hong Kong’s fiscal reserves, revenue, and expenditure on a monthly basis starting from September 1998, when the government started to release monthly financial summaries in compliance with IMF standards.

Given that DATA.GOV.HK only offers datasets from April 2019 onward, this project extends its reach by scraping and compiling financial data from earlier government press releases. The resulting dataset spans from September 1998 to the present, encompassing detailed monthly records of revenue, expenditure, bond proceedings, surplus or deficit, and the start and end fiscal reserves for each month.

The dataset can be found in the file “Monthly Financial Results 1998-present.xlsx” uploaded here. In case the dataset on the repository isn’t up to date, you can always access up-to-date data from DATA.GOV.HK. To provide a clearer picture of the financial landscape, here’s a visual representation of the surplus and deficit over the years:

These graphs, alongside all the data and code, are open for public use. Please feel free to utilise these resources in your work.