The Freest Market in the World

On the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People¿s Republic of China, this book presents the first monographic study of the Hong Kong Basic Law as an economic document. The Basic Law codifies what Gonzalo Villalta Puig and Eric C Ip call free market constitutionalism, the logic of Hong Kong¿s economic liberty as the freest market economy in the world.

This book, which is the outcome of several years of study with the financial support of the General Research Fund of Hong Kong¿s Research Grants Council, evaluates the public choice rationale of the Basic Law and its projection on the Hong Kong economy, with a focus on the policy development of economic liberty both internally and externally. In the academic tradition of James M Buchanan¿s constitutional political economy, the book opens with a conceptualisation of free market constitutionalism in Hong Kong. It studies the origins of this concept in the 19th-c