Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) yesterday said measures to stimulate the economy should be treated as disaster-relief operations and had to be implemented with maximum efficiency.
Executive Yuan spokesman Su Jun-pin (蘇俊賓) told reporters that Liu made the comments during a Cabinet-level meeting on proposals of how to improve efficiency in public construction.
The government has planned to boost the economy by using more public investment, approximately NT$600 billion (US$17.78 billion), which is about NT$200 billion higher than the average over the past five years.
“It will be the biggest ever public construction program in Taiwan. The crucial factors to success are capacity and efficiency in implementing the projects,” Su said.
Frank Fan (范良銹), chairman of the Public Construction Commission (PCC), was quoted by Su as saying that Taiwan’s construction industry has sufficient capacity to perform all the construction work.
Fan said the plan assumed that the average yearly total of NT$30 billion in consultants’ fees on construction projects could cover 20 times more work.
The NT$600 billion project includes nearly NT$362.6 billion from this year’s annual budget, NT$30.5 billion left over from last year’s domestic demand expansion budget, and a portion of the NT$500 billion budget allocated for construction expansion projects between this year and 2012.
Liu commissioned the PCC to coordinate resources between public and private sectors to make sure the construction projects would be carried out on schedule and to revise related regulations lest red tape and bureaucracy hinder the implementation of the programs.
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
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