My previous article asked: why does Macau master “event-based vitality”, but fail to invest seriously in “institutional vitality”? The answer may lie in the rapid growth of gaming.
This is not a criticism. The prosperity brought by gaming is real: abundant reserves, low unemployment and a top-ranking GDP per capita. These are the fruits of the post-handover effort and proof of the success of “One Country, Two Systems”.
But prosperity has a hidden cost. When wealth comes from a single sector, that sector absorbs political attention, talent and social imagination. Not because leaders lack vision, but because the “urgent” outweighs the “important”. Gaming has daily urgencies; the potential of other industries, because it is “not urgent”, is postponed year after year. The result: Macau has many institutional assets, but they remain dormant.
For example, Macau is one of the rare Chinese cities with no foreign exchange controls and with free port status. Today, this advantage serves gaming capital, but does not systematically attract other international capital. Macau has Portuguese as an official language, the Forum Macao, and connects 200 million people across nine Portuguese-speaking countries.
But the platform remains focused on ministerial summits; daily business, arbitration and knowledge exchange do not take place here on a continuous basis. These assets have value — it simply has not been realised.
I call this the “opportunity cost of institutional capital”: Macau does not lack capacity, but during the years of prosperity, resources and imagination went to the most profitable sector. Other possibilities, because they were not urgent, fell dormant.
The collapse in gaming revenue during the pandemic was a rehearsal. The city realised: without gamblers, what is left? This was the context that set the course for economic diversification. There is a direction, but not yet an ecosystem. Institutional support still needs time. In the next article, I will discuss the institutional assets that remain to be activated — the cards Macau holds, but has not yet played.
