A new youth entrepreneurship program unveiled last month by President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) last month could materialize in March at the soonest, Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Lin Chuan-neng (林全能) said yesterday.
The program aims to have the government act as guarantor to help applicants secure loans totaling up to NT$60 billion (US$2 billion), or NT$1 million per applicant, the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) said.
Young people planning to establish a company would be required to fill out a form at a dedicated window instead of presenting a proposal and would then be put through an accelerated evaluation process that would allow them to receive funds within seven days, with the government would pay interest of up to 1.67 percent on the loans for the first five years, it said.
Photo: CNA
The government has been talks with banks that have expressed a willingness to undertake the program to discuss the possibility of establishing a dedicated window at bank branches nationwide to start receiving applications in March or April, Lin told a news conference at the Executive Yuan in Taipei.
The ministry said that it would also establish a homegrown youth incubator to aid young people returning to their hometowns to set up companies.
It hopes to replicate the success of the Start-up Terrace in New Taipei City’s Linkou District (林口) and create a similar cluster of innovative start-ups in Tainan’s Shalun (沙崙) area, the ministry said.
While such hubs are currently concentrated in the six special municipalities, Lin said that he hopes incubators could be decentralized and established in townships.
Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) said he has asked MOEA staff to act as undercover customers to test the banks’ progress on introducing such programs.
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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