What is the Economic Development Advisory Conference for? First, think about some basics. This group is composed of 122 members. Given that the difficulty of a committee's achieving anything increases directly in proportion to the number of people that sit on it, this is a pretty unwieldy hit squad for fighting the economic downturn.
By now the causes of the downturn are, or should be, well known. The slump is regional and it is largely connected with the contraction of export markets in the US, particularly in the high-tech sector. New orders for computers fell by one-third in the US in the first four months of this year; when American consumers sneeze, Taiwan's manufacturers -- and, by extension, the entire economy -- catch a cold.
What Taiwan needs, of course, is to diversify its manufacturing base and begin to export more services, rather than manufactured products -- something for which it should be ideally situated.
But diversification can take place in another direction, namely in export markets. If Taiwan has become too dependent on selling one particular kind of product to one particular market, then this should be reasonably easy to rectify. The Economist pointed out in an editorial two weeks ago that the smaller East Asian nations -- all of which are feeling the pinch in the current downturn -- need to stop regarding China as a threat to their markets and look at it as a promising market in its own right. Good advice, perhaps, but Taiwan has a peculiar set of problems in that regard, namely the half-century ban on direct links.
Nobody has ever pretended the direct-links ban makes sense from a business point of view; it exists because of security concerns and because it may be a bargaining chip with China -- for a long time Taiwan has hoped in vain that China might drop the threat of force in return for the ban's lifting. Lee Teng-hui (
The problem for Chen Shui-bian (
Looking at the conference membership there should be overwhelming support for lifting the ban. Chen could then give a "what else can I do" shrug and put the machinery for raising the ban into motion. Of course it might not be quite that simple and if the politically lame-brained Lien Chan (
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