Just five days after the appointment of a new board of directors, Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) gave his assurance that new stations would be built in Miaoli, Changhua and Yunlin counties. This promise is an indication of the role to be played by government after deprivatization. It shows that the government will be given more room to participate in deciding THSRC’s operations strategy — including having the final say. Will such government intervention be a blessing or a curse for the operational performance of THSRC, which is still, after all, a privately invested BOT institution?
As government shareholders take on the company’s massive debt, the public should expect that not just the fat cats, but the rats, too, will be caught. Past experience of government-run engineering projects is that budgets keep on growing, the design keeps getting changed and so on. These wasteful practices should not be allowed to creep into THSRC. If possible, we would like to see the government catch the “tiger” — the black hole that has eaten up Taiwan’s competitiveness — because it was the lack of state financing that made the company dependent on private enterprises in the first place. If the state coffers had been in a better shape, we would not be talking about BOT irregularities today.
Taiwan could get by without THSRC, but we would not want to lose the benefits brought by the high-speed rail system and its dependable service.
Hank Huang is director of the BOT Research Center at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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