The Driver Analysis Of The Development Of The Hong Kong Offshore Financial Market From The Embeddedness Perspective

Offshore finance has became one of the most significant innovation in the process of the evolution of modern finance in the world for its giant growth since the 1950’s.Since more and more offshore financial markets have been emerging in succession. Scholars therefore have began to explore the impetus behind the development of offshore financial markets. If economic factors can be seen as the only power to promote the development of offshore markets? It seems that the answers of economists are not so simple.Since Polanyi had proposed "the Embeddings Theory", a huge number of social scientists have began to swarm into the field of economic research. They have treated the economic relations as one of the objects that embedded in social relations and had formed the latter Economic Sociology. Economic Sociology focuses on economic and non-economic aspects of social life, and analyzes the economic activities in the method of sociology. As one of the economic activities, offshore financial market should be included the scope of research of Economic Sociology naturally.Hong Kong as one of the most representative of the internal and external hybrid offshore financial markets, the formation of its offshore financial market due to the financial liberalization policies by Hong Kong authority. In view of the geographical position, Hong Kong is adjacent to China mainland; it could be an important reference for China to develop offshore financial market. Therefore, we select Hong Kong offshore financial market as our study object.In order to conclude the social factors affecting the development of the Hong Kong offshore financial market and provide the theory basis of sociology to establish China’s offshore financial market, this article put the Hong Kong offshore financial market into the research scope of economic sociology. We will review the history and present situation of Hong Kong offshore financial market, and utilize a approach of Embeddings Theory to analyze the motivation to promote the development of Hong Kong offshore financial market from four aspects which are structure, polity, culture and cognitive.