Taiwan’s “suffering index” dropped to 5 percent last year, well below the Asian average of 11 percent, in the latest annual Gallup survey of 157 countries on their citizens’ well-being.
The suffering index measures respondents’ perceptions of where they stand on a ladder scale with steps numbered from zero to 10, where zero represents the worst possible life.
Individuals are considered to be “suffering” if they rate their current lives at four or lower and expect their lives to be the same in five years’ time.
In Taiwan, only 5.3 percent of respondents were classified as suffering. This was down 3 percentage points from the previous year and down 9 percentage points from 2009.
Asian countries overall scored well in the survey, with a suffering index averaging 11 percent, compared with 14 percent in Europe and 6 percent in the Americas.
Other suffering indices in the region showed 4.5 percent of respondents in Vietnam said they were suffering, 6.2 percent in Malaysia, 6.5 percent in South Korea, 9.4 percent in Indonesia, 9.8 percent in Japan and 12 percent in China.
Thailand, at 1 percent, was the Asian country with the lowest suffering index and trailed only Brazil, Switzerland and Norway, among all countries surveyed.
The countries with the highest suffering index were Bulgaria at 45 percent, Yemen (38 percent), Armenia (35 percent) and El Salvador (33 percent).
Though Taiwan made progress in the “suffering” part of the index from 2010 to last year, it fared slightly worse in the number of respondents who were classified as “thriving,” falling to 31 percent from 32 percent in 2010.
Compared with other countries in the region, that number was on a par with Singapore, where 34 percent of people said they were thriving, better than Japan (26 percent) and China (18 percent), but worse than South Korea, where 50 percent were thriving, and Thailand (46 percent).
The survey was conducted through face-to-face interviews or via telephone in 157 countries on about 1,000 people aged over 15 per country.
In Taiwan, 1,001 people were interviewed between June 15 and Oct. 6 last year, and the poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods