H7N9 avian influenza could affect the retail and restaurant sectors — as well as the economy as a whole — if the virus becomes transmissible among humans, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
If the bird flu became more serious and continued for three months, the nation’s GDP is forecast to drop by 0.004 percentage points, Minister of Economic Affairs Chang Chia-juch (張家祝) said, citing research conducted by the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院).
“If more cases [of H7N9 infection] are found, the nation’s economy might be hurt to some degree,” Chang told the legislature’s Economics Committee. “The flu would also hit the nation’s consumption, production and export-related sectors if the flu outbreak gets worse.”
“The ministry has set up a special task force to monitor the situation. We aim to be well-prepared to prevent the disease from spreading,” Chang said.
In addition, local facial mask manufacturers have agreed to increase production to 800,000 masks a day from 500,000, he said, in an attempt to ease concerns over a shortage.
However, lawmakers cast doubts on the ministry’s estimates of economic damage due to H7N9 bird flu.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Ting Shou-chung (丁守中) said that the estimate of “0.004 percentage points is quite small, but there are people saying we should not underestimate the bird flu?”
Taiwan suffered an economic loss of NT$64.3 billion (US$2.18 billion) 10 years ago because of the SARS outbreak, Ting added.
He said the government’s efforts to counter an avian influenza epidemic might be more challenging this time, because the number of people traveling across the Taiwan Strait is now 10 times higher than it was a decade ago.
Citing the institute’s research, Chang said that in the early stages of the outbreak of SARS, H5N1 or H1N1 in the past, the economic impact from the epidemic was “very minimal.”
The government last week decided to advance a ban on the slaughter of live poultry in traditional markets to May 17, from its original date of June 17, as a preventive measure after the nation reported its first confirmed H7N9 infection on Wednesday last week.
Neither Chang nor Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Bao-ji (陳保基) offered any estimate about the ban’s impact on vendors of live poultry.
Vendors offering live poultry slaughtering at traditional markets are encouraged to sign contracts with legal slaughterhouses and to change their selling practices, Chen told the committee.
In addition, consumers are advised to purchase meat products processed by legal slaughterhouses, he added.
Chen said the government would refund poultry sellers for birds culled for carrying avian influenza, especially H7N9.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
The founder of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group (恆大集團) has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and bribery, a court said yesterday, the latest blow for what was once the country’s leading developer. Evergrande’s rise was propelled by decades of rapid urbanization and rising living standards, but in 2020, its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation. The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors. Founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), 67, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, was reportedly held by police in 2023, with Evergrande saying he had been subjected to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
RSS