The Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) Development Fund Management Committee together with five local banks announced the establishment of a financial services platform yesterday in a bid to make it easier to give loans to SMEs.
“SMEs’ lack of transparency in their financial information has often made it difficult for financial institutions to evaluate loan risks. Therefore, in general, financial institutions’ willingness to give SMEs loans is low compared with loans for large enterprises,” Shih Yen-shiang (施顏祥), administrative deputy minister of the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), said at a press conference yesterday.
The platform will help banks simplify SME loan procedures and verify data accuracy.
“The platform can accurately reflect SMEs’ operating information for banks to verify, which will help shorten the loan process,” Jack Huang (黃新吉), president of Taiwan Business Bank (台灣中小企銀), said yesterday.
Yang Ya-hwei (楊雅惠), a policy-making member of the Financial Supervisory Commission, said that bank loans to SMEs in Taiwan increased around NT$795.4 billion (US$26.19 billion) from July 2005 to last month, with the total amount of loans reaching NT$3.16 trillion.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last