The Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) yesterday raised its forecast for economic growth this year to 4.74 from its previous prediction, made in November, of 4.1 percent.
The economy grew 3.24 percent last year and 3.59 percent in 2002, the DGBAS said.
The economy grew 5.17 percent in the fourth quarter of last year from the year before and is expected to grow 5.16 percent in the first quarter and 5.21 percent in the second quarter this year, the agency said in a statement.
The DGBAS said it made the revision because of the revival in the global economy led by the US and China which is increasing imports from neighboring countries. As one of the largest exporters to China, Taiwan is expected to export 10 percent more this year.
The increase in trade will attract private investment, especially in thin-film transistor liquid-crystal displays, or TFT-LCD, semiconductors and DVD-R makers, it said.
The DGBAS said government spending, which is expected to grow by 1.4 percent this year, and rising domestic consumption, forecast to grow 3.3 percent, would also contribute to economic growth.
The consumer price index will likely expand by 0.48 percent, the statement said. Taiwan experienced a recession in 2001 and commodity prices have remained unchanged since then.
The government's GDP forecast is lower than those by private institutes.
The Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (
Chen Tain-jy (陳添枝), president of the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (中經院), said on Thursday that GDP growth will definitely grow more than 5 percent this year, a prediction he based on better-than-expected economic indicators from the past two months. Last year, his institute forecast growth this year of 4.36 percent.
Several economic indexes have shown encouraging signs recently. The unemployment rate held at a two-year low of 4.58 percent in December, while the benchmark TAIEX on Thursday reached a 41-month high of 6,681.52.
Overseas economists are even more upbeat about the nation's economy. A report from UK-based Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) last month said the economy would grow by 5.4 percent this year. Goldman Sachs also revised upward its forecast from 5 percent to 5.8 percent in a report published in November.
One element of uncertainty is the presidential election, but analysts said they expected only a short-term effect.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
Taiwan’s long-term economic competitiveness will hinge not only on national champions like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC, 台積電) but also on the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies, a US-based scholar has said. At a lecture in Taipei on Tuesday, Jeffrey Ding, assistant professor of political science at the George Washington University and author of "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers," argued that historical experience shows that general-purpose technologies (GPTs) — such as electricity, computers and now AI — shape long-term economic advantages through their diffusion across the broader economy. "What really matters is not who pioneers
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
China Vanke Co (萬科), China’s last major developer to have so far avoided default amid an unprecedented property crisis, has been left with little time to keep debt failure at bay after creditors spurned its proposal to push back a looming bond payment. Once China’s biggest homebuilder by sales, Vanke failed to obtain sufficient support for its plan to delay paying the 2 billion yuan (US$283.51 million) note due today, a filing to the National Association of Financial Market Institutional Investors showed late on Saturday. The proposal, along with two others on the ballot, would have allowed a one-year extension. All three
RSS