Taiwan is experiencing a severe imbalance between talent inflows and outflows, with the majority of Taiwanese leaving to work abroad having higher education degrees that qualify them for professional jobs, while most foreigners working in Taiwan are non-professionals, an official research report said.
The number of Taiwanese working in abroad increased from 662,000 in 2009 to 728,000 in 2016, a labor policy report by the Legislative Yuan Budget Center said.
Among Taiwanese working overseas in 2016, 534,000, or 73.4 percent, had undergraduate, graduate or higher academic degrees, the report said.
In contrast, the number of foreign professionals working in Taiwan rose much more slowly, from 27,319 in 2008 to 30,928 in 2016, the report said, adding that only 2,634, or 8.52 percent, of them were high-ranking executives at foreign companies or those that belong to Taiwanese expats.
At the same time, the number of foreigners hired to perform non-professional jobs in Taiwan grew from 365,060 in 2008 to 676,142 in 2016, the report said.
The report raised concerns over the potential effects of the brain drain on Taiwan’s technological competitiveness.
With most foreigners coming to Taiwan to work not qualified to help improve the nation’s innovation and research and development capabilities, the nation faces a “high-out, low-in” deficit in its talent bank, the report said.
In addition to the talent imbalance, Taiwan also saw an imbalance in labor supply and demand.
For example, the labor shortage rate in the industrial sector increased from 1.79 percent in February 2009 to 3.1 percent in February this year and the ratio of vacant jobs to the number of people unemployed surged from 19 percent in 2009 to 56 percent this year, the report said.
In February, Taiwan had a jobless rate of 3.7 percent, or 438,000, while its industrial sector reported that 243,920 positions were vacant, it said.
The industrial sector is in desperate need of workers, but is suffering from a labor shortage due to a lack of people with the right qualifications, beside other factors, the report said.
The Budget Center is tasked with researching, analyzing, assessing and advising on the central government’s budget and other bills.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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