President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said he regrets that the cross-strait service trade agreement signed nine months ago is still stalled in the legislature and he is worried the delay could hurt Taiwan’s credibility in the international community.
“We will be unable to take the consequences,” Ma said, adding that the delay could lead to other trading partners to question Taiwan’s sincerity in pushing for trade liberalization.
Legislative committees began a joint review of the pact on Wednesday, but amid scuffles between lawmakers, no progress was made.
Photo: CNA
More confrontations are expected when the legislature continues the review next week.
Ma said that the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed in 2010 has proven a great boost to Taiwan, but added that the pact only covers a small number of goods. Items covered by the agreement have shown growth despite the sluggish economy, and some businesses would not have survived without the deal, he said.
The government is hoping to complete a commodity trade pact this year, but if the service trade deal does not clear the legislature soon, the commodity trade pact would be affected, he said.
Taiwan must reform and open up in areas in which it does not have to rely on others to become more competitive, he said.
Ma said that trade with New Zealand has increase 73 percent since a bilateral economic cooperation agreement was signed with the country last year.
“No matter whether we like it or not” the cruel fact is that Taiwan relies on exports for 70 percent of its economic growth and unemployment will result if exports are poor, he said.
Meanwhile, Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) said he hoped Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and opposition lawmakers could sit down to exchange views on the service trade deal, although it would be difficult.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
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
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. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS