Bill Cho (卓士昭), Taiwan’s former representative to Kuwait, was sworn in yesterday as director-general of the Bureau of Foreign Trade (BOFT).
He told reporters after the ceremony that Taiwan has now entered the “post-ECFA [Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement] era” and the bureau has been given a pivotal task to help Taiwanese companies ride new business opportunities.
Cho, who returned from Kuwait on Sunday, is expected to lead a new round of trade negotiations with China in the coming months.
“The bureau has the following key responsibilities: Helping companies explore overseas markets; assisting them in landing more orders; and offering efficient operational workflow for enterprises to export or import products,” he said.
Taiwanese firms have been at a disadvantage in terms of tariffs when making forays into overseas markets, Cho said, and he hoped his new role at the bureau would help change that and increase companies’ competitiveness in the global landscape.
“After a country signs a free-trade agreement [FTA] with another country, their domestic enterprises could easily access each other’s market. Without an FTA, Taiwanese firms are at a disadvantage,” he said.
Cho said this situation would soon change now that Taiwan and China have thrown their doors open to each other in selected areas by gradually lowering tariffs to zero percent.
Cho’s predecessor, Huang Chih-peng (黃志鵬), a key negotiator for Taiwan in the ECFA talks with China, assumed his new post as representative to Vietnam on Oct. 6.
Huang told Central News Agency in Hanoi on Friday last week that Taiwan was Vietnam’s second-largest source of foreign funds and that he expects Taiwan to take the top position soon.
Huang said his office would help trade and investment activities launched by Taiwanese businesses in Vietnam, while trying to boost bilateral relations by first seeking progress in bilateral links in the fields of culture, education and medical care.
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
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