As protests continue to roil Hong Kong, a widely followed economist has an idea about how to ease tensions: China, he said, needs to take power away from the city's tycoons and fix its property market. The east Asian financial hub has been rocked by civil unrest in recent months with operations of Hong Kong International Airport severely disrupted this week due to a sit-in by protesters. The ongoing demonstrations in the city started as peaceful rallies against a single proposed law but have snowballed into a wider pro-democracy movement, with some even demanding full autonomy from Beijing amid occasional outbreaks of violence. Social discontent with stratospheric housing prices is playing a major part in the unrest, Andy Xie, an independent economist, told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Wednesday. "Hong Kong has been a pressure cooker for a long time," he said. According to the Centa-City Leading Index, a widely used indicator of the city's residential price trends, property prices have appreciated over 300% since 2003 when they tanked due to a disease epidemic.

But wages have largely stagnated in the same period, so "it's very difficult to see how young people can feel hope. They know they'll never be able to afford a place, so they cannot start a family. How can they get ahead in life? Desperation, and really a deep sense of unhappiness, is driving this unrest," said Xie. Xie's comments come just as business leaders are coming out to voice their stand as protests start to take a toll on the Hong Kong economy. On Sunday, property tycoons in Hong Kong issued a joint petition to newspapers calling on the public to cease illegal protests and allow the return of stability, the South China Morning Post reported. CITIC Capital CEO Zhang Yichen, meanwhile, posted a notice appealing for the restoration of law and order in Hong Kong on his WeChat social media account on Wednesday. The notice urges support for the Hong Kong government and police. CITIC Capital is the alternative investment arm of Chinese financial conglomerate CITIC Group. Last year, global chairty network Oxfam flagged a "particularly severe" wealth disparity in Hong Kong, which it said was the highest among all developed countries and regions. Hong Kong is the world's most expensive city to buy a home, according to another report released in April.