A senior government statistician said on Wednesday that the increase in the official number of low-income households is a result of government efforts to expand welfare coverage to more people. According to the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS), the number of low-income households increased from 105,265 in 2009 to 112,200 last year — a 6.58 percent increase during a time when Taiwan recorded 10.8 percent GDP growth. Deputy DGBAS minister Lu Du-chin (鹿篤瑾) attributed the hike to a change in the definition of the term “low-income household” since last year, when the poverty line was raised to cover more disadvantaged families, Lu said.
He cited Taipei as an example, where those who own less than NT$5 million (US$172,000) in property were listed as poor in 2009. However, that level has since been revised upward to NT$5.5 million.
As for other cities and counties, the poverty line was raised from NT$2.6 million to NT$3 million, Lu said. “Raising the poverty line enables us to better take care of more disadvantaged families,” he said.
People should not distort the government’s efforts to help the disadvantaged by saying more people are poor now, he said.
DGBAS statistics also show that the wealth gap between the richest 20 percent of households and poorest 20 percent of households shrank from 6.34 times in 2009 to 6.19 times last year. Despite the decline, last year’s household income gap was still the third highest on record, with the highest recorded in 2001 at 6.39 times.
Those figures triggered considerable public debate, with the Democratic Progressive Party criticizing the government for failing to stop the wealth gap from growing. National Youth Commission Minister Lee Yun-jie (李允傑) defended the administration, saying that “no government in the past 50 years of the Republic of China has done as much as President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration” to narrow the wealth gap.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching