Taiwan ranked 47th in the world in terms of ease of doing business for last year, down four notches from the previous year, an annual report released recently by The World Bank Group showed.
Among Asian countries, Taiwan had the eighth-most conducive environment to operate a business last year, the Doing Business 2007 Report showed.
The report measured business regulations and their enforcement across 175 economies.
Singapore ranked first in the survey, followed by New Zealand and the US. Rounding out the top 10 list were Canada, Hong Kong, the UK, Denmark, Australia, Norway and Ireland, in that order.
In the Asian region, Taiwan lagged behind Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia and Mongolia, but it placed ahead of China, which ranked 93rd.
Among all 10 sub-indices used in the survey, Taiwan performed the worst in terms of ease of employing workers, ranking 154th among the 175 economies surveyed.
Taiwan's difficulty of hiring index stood at 78, compared with the average of 23.7 for the East Asian and Pacific region and 17 for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member states.
In terms of ease of dealing with licenses, the survey found that it required an average of 32 procedures and 206 days to build a warehouse in Taiwan, which was higher than the average of 17.6 procedures and 147.4 days for the region and 14 procedures and 149.5 days for OECD countries
Meanwhile, Taiwan's ranking was down eight places to 94th in terms of ease of starting a business, down one spot to 78th in terms of ease of paying taxes, down two notches to 62nd in ease of enforcing contracts, down two places to 60th in ease of protecting investors, down seven places to 48th in ease of getting credit, and up one spot to 42nd in terms of ease of trading across borders.
Taiwan performed the best in terms of ease of closing a business, with the nation's ranking moving up one notch to fourth for last year. Taiwan's second-best performing area was ease of registering property, with the country ranking 24th, down two notches from 2005.
In related news, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday that a total of 86 investment projects amounting to an estimated NT$7.8 billion (US$236.36 million) have been initiated under a project launched last September to attract overseas Taiwanese businesspeople to invest in Taiwan.
Of the 86 investment projects, 34 are by Taiwanese businesspeople operating in China, 12 are by Taiwanese businesspeople based in Southeast Asia, 35 by businesspeople in the US and Canada, and five by Taiwanese businesspeople in New Zealand, Germany, Japan or Africa.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day