Worrying about an increasing gap between the supply of human resources and the nation's growing employment needs, Premier Yu Shyi-kun yesterday said the falling birth rate must be reversed and more people should seek advanced studies abroad.
Answering questions at the National Affairs Conference for Youth held in the Chungshan Building on Yangmingshan, Yu said that there is an ever-growing gap between the nation's educational sector and the industrial sector in terms of quality and quantity of supplies of high-caliber manpower.
Citing a report by the Council for Cultural Affairs, Yu said that the hi-tech industrial sector as a whole has 6,100 openings of various kinds of jobs this year that are still unfilled and the manpower shortage is expected to top 10,000 individuals next year.
Yu said that Taiwan's hi-tech industrial sector -- a driving force pushing Taiwan to become one of the economic powerhouses in the world -- was established and is nurtured by high-caliber scientists and specialists who returned to the country after obtaining advanced degrees abroad.
In recent years, however, the number of the country's students going abroad for higher education, particularly to the US, has dropped, Yu said. This is one situation that the government is concerned about, he added.
To help redress the issue, Yu said, the Executive Yuan has hammered out an "elite studying abroad" program, in hopes that more than 1,000 students from Taiwan will go abroad for advanced studies each year, including those sponsored by the government.
Regarding the nations' declining birth rate and a possible negative growth in population, Yu said that Taiwan's average birth rate is now already lower than those of Singapore and France.
The government will continue to encourage married women to have more children, Yu said, adding that it is hoped that the country's average birth rate will again be 2.2 children per married woman for her entire life.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the