Claiming that the nation's economic-growth rate would be boosted by 2 percent with the implementation of the five-year, NT$500 billion public construction package, the Cabinet yesterday approved the bill's massive budget and sent it to the legislature, where the bill itself remains bogged down.
"While this year's economic growth rate is estimated to reach 3.15 percent, it's predicted to advance to 5 percent next year with the five-year plan and the jobless rate to drop from this year's 5 percent to 4.5 percent," Cabinet Spokesman Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) quoted Premier Yu Shyi-kun as saying after the weekly closed-door Cabinet meeting yesterday morning.
Yu made the remark after listening to the reports delivered by Ho Mei-yueh (何美玥), vice chairwoman of the Cabinet's Council for Economic Planning and Development, on the last year of the four-year national construction projects and by Directorate General of the Budget, Accounting and Statistics Office Hale Liu (劉三錡) on the NT$500 billion special budget.
Approved by Yu, the last year of the four-year plan will take effect on Jan. 1 next year.
According to Ho, the goal of 5 percent economic growth could be reached by obtaining a 2.4 percent rate of domestic consumption, 2.2 percent rate of domestic investment and 0.4 percent rate of net international demand.
While 3.2 percent of the 5 percent economic growth rate would be generated from knowledge intensive industries, the remaining 1.8 percent would come from non-knowledge intensive industries.
Although the council predicts a 5 percent economic growth rate for next year, domestic and international economic institutions are not as optimistic.
The government-funded think tank Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research puts it at 4.26 percent, while another government-funded economic think tank, the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research, predicts 4.62 percent.
The International Monetary Fund's estimate is 3.8 percent and Global Insight predicts 4.3 percent.
Despite the controversy revolving around the three-month delay of the Suao-Hualien freeway, the NT$96.2 billion project is still included in the NT$500 billion special budget.
The budget, if approved by the legislature, will be last five years. The budget for the first year is NT$93 billion, the second year NT84 billion, the third year NT$101 billion, the fourth year NT$114 billion and the last year NT$106 billion.
While the Cabinet plans to borrow 80 percent, or NT$400 billion, of the total, it hopes to raise the remaining 20 percent, or NT$100 billion, by selling stakes of state-owned businesses, vending tickets of the 2008 exposition and hawking gravel excavated from the four artificial lakes included in the plan.
Of the NT$500 billion, over NT$471.2 billion is reserved for the 10 constructions, NT$18.7 billion is the interest payment of the NT$400 billion loan, NT$3 billion is the expenditure on the NT$93 billion release of state-run enterprises' stakes, and the remaining NT$7 billion is an emergency fund.
The 10 construction projects package encompass four areas: a NT$212.8 billion sustainable ecology project, which makes up 42 percent of total spending; a NT$107.9 billion international competitiveness project (22 percent); a NT$100.6 billion culture and creativity project (20 percent); and a NT$50 billion research and development project (10 percent).
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