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Post-Morakot efforts to be prioritized

Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-shiang (施顏祥) said yesterday that he will prioritize rescue and rebuilding efforts in areas devastated by Typhoon Morakot.

Other priorities would be efforts to enhance disaster prevention and continue the nation’s economic development, Shih told the press on the first day of his new job.

Also, “signing an economic cooperation framework agreement [ECFA] with China is of utmost importance to Taiwan’s future. Hence ECFA promotion will proceed at full speed,” Shih said.

Shih said he had not had much time to think about the labor-intensive industries that would be adversely affected by the ECFA since being appointed to his new job on Wednesday but that he would take the time to evaluate the situation and minimize any negative impact.

The new minister also said he was a bit behind on the progress of consolidation for the nation’s dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chip industry because he mainly focused on the state oil refinery’s business operations during his last six months as chairman of CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油).

“However, the government’s direction on the DRAM initiative remains unchanged and it is crucial for local companies to root their future technologies in Taiwan, as opposed to continuing to purchase expensive, foreign intellectual property rights,” Shih said.

He did not elaborate on the future role of Taiwan Memory Co (TMC, 台灣創新記憶體公司) in the industry’s consolidation.

On Premier Wu Den-yih’s (吳敦義) call for an adoption of a “grassroots economics (庶民經濟)” approach to measure the economy rather than traditional methods like GDP and the consumer price index, Shih wholeheartedly agreed.

“Often economists get too carried away with jargon,” Shih said, adding that current economic data failed to reflect the true picture of the average citizen’s well-being.

In an interview with the Chinese-language United Evening News on Thursday, Wu cited the stock market index, restaurant profits, air cargo transport and the number of cargo trucks on freeways as possible alternative indices that could help policymakers get a real picture of economic activity.

“The citizen index or street corner index as some call it, is an alternative and unscientific way of gauging the economic health of middle and low income sections of society,” Hwang Jen-te (黃仁德) professor and head of the department of economics at National Chengchi University, told the Taipei Times yesterday.

Examples can include observing activities at local traditional markets, spending patterns at street diners, or consumption values at wholesale warehouses, he said.

“To truly understand and assist the nation’s poor, the new minister must align the interests of the underprivileged with his economic policies, instead of using a citizen index as just another political slogan,” Hwang said.

Shih should re-think the ECFA and other ministry policies that have always favored big corporations, while creating unemployment for local unskilled, blue-collar workers, he added.
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