Mainland, Macao anticipate broader connections in trade

While traffic and logistics hurdles have weakened international trade and tourism, people in the Macao Special Administrative Region ( SAR) may feel the opposite when it comes to greater connections with the Chinese mainland, even in hard times.

Experts suggested the Macao SAR can take advantage of the mainland’s booming market and consumption capacity to achieve sustainable growth.

The city and the mainland have seen growing interaction this year. Just months ago came the launch of a mutually recognized health code in the Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao region that enables people to move across the border with an exemption from 14- day quarantines. The health code has been used up to 38 million times so far.

Resilient personal interactions have greatly boosted progress in cooperation and investment for Macao companies to ride on the booming opportunities of the mainland amid the rapid market rebound.

The two places implemented a joint funding program for scientific and technological innovation. Construction of 24 projects in the Guangdong- Macao Cooperation Industrial Park in Hengqin, South China’s Guangdong Province has started, according to a report by Zhuhai government on Sunday.

“Due to the limited size of Macao itself, many Macao enterprises have now settled in the Hengqin free trade zone, which not only creates a new model of cooperation between Guangdong and Macao but also enables Macao to be a hub between the mainland and the world,” Li Xiaobin, a Macao studies expert at Nankai University in North China’s Tianjin, told the Global Times on Sunday.