Shanghai gains in competitiveness list (3)

"Hong Kong is facing quite a challenge from Shanghai,” said Gui Qiangfang, president of the institute.

Shanghai's economy is in fact already much larger than Hong Kong's. In the first half of the year, Shanghai's gross domestic product increased by 7.2 percent year-on-year to 955.2 billion yuan ($115 billion). That compares with Hong Kong's GDP of $96.68 billion, a year-on-year increase of just 0.9 percent.

Beijing's GDP is also larger than Hong Kong's. And Gui projected that the economies of many of China's second-tier cities, including Tianjin, Hangzhou and Suzhou, will also become larger than Hong Kong's in the next five to eight years.

For the time being, Hong Kong is still considered to have sounder legal and market systems than Shanghai, especially when they are gauged by their general openness.

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