The nation's major business groups yesterday urged the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-led legislature to shift its focus from the election campaign back to economic issues to ensure a viable investment environment for local businesses.
"We hope the new legislature will return to the fundamentals and take on the responsibility of accelerating the passage of economic initiatives that will facilitate a more business-friendly environment," said Luo Huai-jia (羅懷家), executive director of the Taiwan Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers' Association (電電公會).
Luo said his association expected the new legislature to soon review three major bills that would continue to provide tax incentives to the local electronics sector as well as the Foreign Trade Act (
Addressing these bills, he said, would promote sustainable economic growth for the nation and improve the research and development capabilities of manufacturing-based companies.
General Chamber of Commerce (
Tax cuts, such as on the inheritance tax, would also help end capital flight to tax heavens and could even provide an incentive for investors to bring their assets back to Taiwan, Chang said.
Congratulating the KMT on its landslide victory, Chang said that if the party's two-thirds majority helped improve the new legislature's administrative efficiency, the results might not be a bad thing for the nation.
The results of the election also highlighted voter dissatisfaction with the DPP government's lackluster performance in propping up the local economy, said Guy Wittich, chief executive officer of the European Chamber of Commerce Taipei.
Voters not so much showed their support for the KMT, he said, but rather cast a vote of no confidence in the DPP's performance on the economic front.
Wittich urged the new legislature to focus on economic issues after little improvement had been made on domestic consumer confidence in the past eight years.
He also expressed concern over the nation's export-driven economic future, which would very likely be hit by the subprime mortgage-triggered economic slowdown in the US.
"What needs to be done is that Taiwan needs to quickly normalize its relations with China, which can provide an injection to the local economy," he said.
Wittich reiterated the chamber's calls for the local government's immediate implementation of direct cross-strait links and further relaxation of cross-strait business restrictions to ensure the nation's economic competitiveness.
The American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei would not comment on yesterday's election.
Roscher Lin (
He said he hoped the next legislature would communicate with the private sector on a frequent basis before rushing to pass any economic initiatives that may add to the difficulty of doing businesses in Taiwan.
Lin also urged the newly elected legislature to stop boycotting the central government's budget bills or initiatives that could help improve people's livelihood or reinforce the nation's infrastructure, which he said can be detrimental to the nation's economy.
Lin said he believed the outgoing legislature's decision to force companies with more than 30 employees into implementing parental leave was hastily made and represented an added burden on small companies.
It is to be hoped, he said, that the new legislature will avoid repeating such hasty policymaking.
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
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
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,