President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) ambition to create a plan for a “golden decade” (黃金十年計畫) will be nothing but a slogan if the nation’s financial structure is not fixed in time, experts told a forum on the president’s proposal yesterday.
Taiwan Thinktank chairman Chen Po-chih (陳博志) said that since it came into office in May 2008, Ma’s administration had appeared to confuse slogans with policies and that it had difficulty making good on its promises.
“It keeps feeding Taiwanese pacifiers when what the latter really needs is milk,” he said.
“When [the government] cannot deliver, it comes up with yet another slogan,” Chen told the forum, titled “Slogan? Policy? Whose Golden Decade?”
Chen said he wondered whether the golden decade would suffer the same fate as Ma’s “6-3-3” economic plan, which stands for 6 percent GDP growth per year, a per capita income of US$30,000 and an unemployment rate lower than 3 percent by 2012.
Chen said that while it was not his intention to accuse Ma’s administration of fabricating figures, calculations for GDP growth were more complex than they seemed. His own calculations, based on official data, showed that the administration had overestimated the national income by NT$1.14 trillion (US$39.18 billion) and that such growth was thus obtained at the cost of debt and deficits, he said.
“As the golden decade plan is based on a wrong perception, it is hard to imagine it will be successful,” he said.
Chiou Jiunn-rong (邱俊榮), a professor of economics at National Central University, said he was disappointed by Ma’s failure to unveil details of his golden decade plan during his New Year address on Saturday.
While the administration boasts of economic growth, the public is unlikely to feel the benefits of economic recovery if the problem of the wealth gap is not addressed, Chiou said.
The administration also hopes to cooperate with China in the six emerging industries, as Ma has proposed, but here again the president did not present any concrete proposals and it is unlikely national coffers could accommodate the development of such industries, Chiou said.
Whether Chinese firms would want to cooperate with their Taiwanese counterparts if Taiwan has little to offer in these areas remains in doubt, he said.
“Healthy government finances is the foundation of all government projects,” he said. “However, the Ma administration has already borrowed more money than the Democratic Progressive Party did in the eight years it was in power,” Chiou said.
“The current government does not have healthy finances. How does it expect to create a golden decade?” he asked.
Su Jain-rong (蘇建榮), a professor of finance at National Taipei University, said the administration could not expect to make the golden decade a reality if it continued to borrow money.
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