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Presidential election 2008: 21 days to go: Former DPP lawmaker says KMT hurting economy

Former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker Lin Cho-shui (林濁水) yesterday published a pamphlet accusing the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of sending the nation's economy into a downward spiral.

The KMT claims the economy has been in decline since the transfer of power in 2000.

Lin said the purpose of his pamphlet was to "deconstruct the myth" that a return to power by the KMT in the March 22 presidential election would bring the nation back to the "golden days" from the 1960s to the 1980s under the former KMT government.

"KMT vice presidential candidate Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) is seen as an important helmsman of the nation's economic development, but in fact it was when Siew started to map out the nation's economic route that the economy began to deteriorate," Lin said.

The DPP sympathizes with people who have been feeling the pinch of an economic slowdown, an increase in the unemployment rate and a widening gap between rich and poor in recent years, but the three trends actually emerged in the late 1980s, he said.

"The numbers talk. The former KMT government didn't perform as well as the DPP government has in dealing with these issues," Lin said.

He said the economic growth rate started a decline to 8 percent in the late 1980s, slowing further to an annual average of 5.6 percent between 1998 and 2000, a sharp drop from the annual average of 9.55 percent that had been maintained for about 20 years since the 1960s.

The unemployment rate rose from 1.8 percent in the early 1990s to 2.99 percent in 2000, he said.

Lin said Taiwan faced the same challenges in the late 1980s as any other developing country that had experienced the transition to developed country status.

However, he said, it was regrettable that the former KMT government adopted mistaken policies along the way.

"In the past, the KMT government just sat by and watched traditional industries move offshore. It thought highly of high-tech industries, but what it had boosted was original equipment manufacturing, leading up to a lack of innovation capabilities among high-tech industries," Lin said.

He said Siew, who had been praised by many for playing a major role in Taiwan mostly escaping the 1997 Asian financial crisis, had created a shaky financial and capital market.

"It was not until 2002, when the DPP government started to implement the first stage of its financial reforms, that the ratio of nonperforming loans at financial institutions was lowered to less than 5 percent and capital adequacy ratios were raised to above 8 percent in two years," Lin said.
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