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Let China-based business list here,government urged

Vincent Siew (蕭萬長), convener of President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) economic advisory panel, urged the government yesterday to relax cross-strait trade restrictions and allow China-based Taiwanese businesses to list on the local stock market.

"[The government] should build Taiwan into a capital-raising hub across the Taiwan Strait and facilitate these [China-based] Taiwanese businesses' financing needs," Siew told a seminar sponsored by the Taiwan Hakka Forum.

During his keynote speech in which he addressed the nation's economic problems and possible remedies, Siew said that Taiwan is incapable of reversing the trend of westbound investments, because China is fast-growing into an economic superpower in the Asia-Pacific region.

Based on that assumption, "What Taiwan can do, instead, is to grab as many opportunities as possible in the process of economic integration across the strait," said Siew, chairman of the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research.

The president's four-member economic advisery panel, which Siew heads, had conducted internal discussions on the matter, he said.

But Siew claimed that his comments yesterday were his personal opinion and not government policy.

"I personally think that's the right direction to go, although some other economic advisers disagreed," Siew said.

He added that the panel has no plan to formally suggest that the president make the policy change, since other economic advisers insisted on facilitation of the policy's supporting measures first.

Minister of Finance Lin Chuan (林全) said late last month that the opening-up policy is still being studied by the government.

No breakthrough will be reached in the near future, since the idea involves many complicated issues such as cross-strait trade relations, the nation's industrial policies and the impact it would have on local capital markets, Lin said.

But Schive Chi (薛琦), president of the Taiwan Academy of Banking and Finance (台灣金融研訓院), argued that the government is using the perceived financial complications as an excuse to impose more barriers on cross-strait trade.

"The government is doing all it can to come up with as many nonsense and non-professional excuses as possible to delay the policy's relaxation," Schive said.

"The [capital] restrictions should be relaxed. The sooner, the better," he added.

As a rebuttal to the government's arguments, Schive said that the region's financial markets are becoming increasingly internationalized and more and more liberalized.

Therefore, he said, the government should move in the direction of deregulation and loosen its grip on capital inflows and outflows.
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