The Cabinet yesterday approved supplementary budget proposals for two job-creation programs.
According to Director-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics Liu San-chi (劉三錡), the Cabinet will request an additional budget of NT$19.9 billion to fund a NT$20 billion program for public service.
The money will come from the leftover annual budget from the previous year and revenues generated from the sale of land and property of the corporatized Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corp.
To fund a NT$50-billion public construction project, the government will issue government bonds totaling NT$45.3 billion. The other NT$4.7 billion will come from the leftover annual budget from the previous year and asset sales of the Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corp.
The NT$45.3 billion debt will be exempted from legal limits on the amount of money the government can borrow and will cause the deficit to make up about 17 percent of this year's budget.
Under public debt rules, the government can borrow up to 15 percent of its annual budget.
The budget requests will be sent to the legislature for further review and final approval as Premier Yu Shyi-kun is scheduled to brief the legislative caucuses on the spending plan on Feb. 27.
According to Liu, the NT$20 billion program is expected to create over 89,000 one-year job opportunities in both the public service sector and small and medium enterprises.
"While the government will offer over 64,000 temporary and seasonal jobs in the public service sector, the small and medium enterprises will offer 25,000 more," Liu said.
To encourage small and medium enterprises to hire people, Liu said, those companies hiring entrants for over six months will be eligible for the application of a monthly government subsidy of NT$10,000 per person.
The maximum number of employees receiving the subsidy is 10 persons per company.
The 100 planned public works projects of the NT$50 billion program will focus on four major categories: transportation and tourism; education, culture and sports; communications and information; and drainage and landscape beatification.
The projects are expected to create a total of 40,000 jobs.
In December, the Executive Yuan approved the NT$20 billion project to create public-service jobs and the NT$50 billion public-construction program with the hope of boosting the economic growth rate to 3.52 percent and lowering the unemployment rate to below 4.5 percent this year.
Together the projects are expected to create 115,000 jobs. Each project will last for one year.
The Cabinet had wanted the projects paid for with special budgets, which would exempt them from legal limits on the amount of money the government can borrow. Opposition parties, on the other hand, want to amend the Public Debt Law (公債法) in order to raise the debt limit or to redirect money from other sources to pay for the projects.
Although the legislature has conditionally approved the NT$20 billion bill, it left the funding of the program to be raised with additional budgets.
The legislative budgetary committee also completed the review of the NT$50 billion project but the proposal failed to pass its second and third reading.
Lawmakers want the Cabinet to fund the project with additional budgets and borrow money if necessary to fund the project. This debt will be exempted from the legal limits on the amount of money the government can borrow.
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