Almost half of the chief executives in Taiwan’s manufacturing, service and financial sectors think the pace of Taiwan’s deregulation in cross-strait exchanges will slow down, according to a poll released yesterday.
About 47 percent of the CEOs said the slowdown would be one of the effects of the recent special municipality elections, the survey by the Chinese-language CommonWealth Magazine showed.
In the Nov. 27 elections, the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) took two of the five municipalies’ mayoral seats, but garnered 5 percentage points more of the popular vote than the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which won the remaining three seats. The five municipalities account for 60 percent of Taiwan’s population.
In the public opinion poll that asked CEOs about the possible effects of the elections on cross-strait relations, 28.11 percent said they did not think there would be any impact, 24.25 percent forecast that the KMT government would step up the pace of opening toward China and 47 percent said the pace of liberalization would slow down.
Taiwan and China signed the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) in June to pave the way for a range of tariff reductions and eliminations from the start of next year.
On the question of the effects of the ECFA on their companies, 4.05 percent of the executives said their businesses had already benefited from the pact. Another 60.98 percent said it had not yet affected their companies in any way, but believed it would benefit them.
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