Globalization is an unavoidable trend and Taiwan needs an appropriate strategy to deal with it, Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) said at the opening of the National Conference on Economic and Trade Affairs in Taipei yesterday.
The nation should consult public opinion on ways to boost its economy amid globalization, Jiang said, adding that Taiwan cannot be left behind as many countries decrease import duties and further integrate their workforces to enhance competitiveness.
Jiang acknowledged concerns that globalization could lead to a widening of the rich-poor divide, affect the flow of capital and cause the nation’s industrial base to be hollowed out, but said Taiwan should confront the issues and find solutions to them.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Times
Former vice premier Lin Hsin-i (林信義) said that going global will not hurt the economy and that any policy that benefited the economy was worth implementing.
Lin added that the government needed to operate more effectively and that its tax system in particular had ample room for improvement. He argued that tax reform could attract overseas Taiwanese businesses to invest in the nation.
Meanwhile, in his keynote speech at the conference, former vice president Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) said that China’s ascent is inevitable and Taiwan should try to take advantage of that rise as a stepping stone for development, rather than closing its doors and opposing anything involving Beijing.
The development of the world economy over the past 20 years has been affected by globalization and the onset of the knowledge economy, which have been far more responsible for Taiwan’s sluggish economy than China’s rise, Siew said.
Globalization and the knowledge economy are both linked to widening income inequality, Siew said, and to address those challenges, the nation needs to adjust its industrial structure and step up the opening of its economy to better connect it to global markets.
Siew said that to revitalize the economy in the short term, the government should boost spending on infrastructure, despite its tight budget.
He also advocated pushing forward a plan to establish free economic pilot zones.
Unlike the controversial service trade agreement agreement with China that calls for a full opening of the service industry, Siew said the economic zone plan aims to relax regulations for developing high-end services on a trial basis.
He appealed to the public to think about the plan in a rational manner and urged all sectors of society to pay more attention to economics rather than to politics, adding that political parties should respect professional opinions when formulating economic policies.
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:
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