2024-06-03
26 分钟This special edition recorded at the UBS Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong features a selection of fascinating conversations and insights we recorded at our Monocle pop-up studio at the Four Seasons. Featuring Professor Paul Romer, Naomi Schiff, Vivian Siu, Dr Jordan Nguyen, Dr Amy Kruse, Martin Yule and Richard Schellbach. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hello and welcome to a very special edition of the Bulletin with UBS here on Monocle Radio.
Regular listeners will be used to hearing insights from the sharpest minds and freshest thinkers around.
But rather than that regular weekly show, we're bringing you something different.
As you can already hear, this is a feature program capturing some of the fascinating conversations and insights we recorded during our recent Monocle Pop Up Radio studio here at the UBS Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong.
So today we present a selection of highlights from our broadcasts at the UBS aic, recorded here at the Four Seasons.
I'm Tom Edwards, hopefully bringing you just a little of the dynamism and discussion that the Monocle team has been lucky enough to experience in person this week.
We're going to start with the Nobel Prize winning economist and former chief economist at the World Bank, Paul Romer.
Paul was on a panel here at the AIC entitled Past, Present and Future Places of Progress.
So how can our cities of tomorrow grow and flourish?
Well, I put that question to Professor Romer, who won Nobel recognition for his work on the impact of human capital, innovation and knowledge on economic growth drivers, of course, that are also critical to the development of cities.
Let me see if I can do my economist thing and turn cities into something that's boring.
So if you think of the demand for floor space in cities, it's going to be proportional to urban income.
You know, think about the rule about like you spend a certain fraction of your income on your mortgage, just scale that up.
So urban income will grow partly because more people will move into urban areas, also because the people who were there will benefit from growth in GDP per capita or output per capita.
So if you look around the world, total urban income, hence total desired spending on urban real estate, is going to grow by 2, 3, 4% per year for kind of the indefinite future.
The problem we're facing is that cities have great difficulty increasing their floor space by 2, 3, 4% per year.
It doesn't sound like much, but it's actually quite a lot.
And you project it forward over many years, it's very hard to sustain.
So what then results is this collision between more demand and limited supply, and it shows up in higher prices instead of in more square feet.
So at a very broad level, I've been pushing this notion that you can try and increase floor space in existing cities, but the growth is so fast we should really be thinking about starting entirely new cities.