■ US economy
Trade deficit his record
The US economy reached a record-high trade deficit in January, importing goods and services worth US$43.1 billion more than its exports, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Exports of meat, consumer goods and auto parts declined, while the value of imports of oil surged to the highest level since March last year. The trade deficit rose from US$42.7 billion in December, the agency said. Exports fell 1.2 percent, while imports declined 0.5 percent. Many countries have stopped importing beef from the US following the December discovery of a single case of mad cow disease, adding to the trade deficit. Meat and poultry exports fell 40 percent, reaching their lowest level since November 1993.
■ Mobile phones
China to invest 252bn yuan
Companies will invest 252 billion yuan (US$30 billion) in high-speed cellular networks in China in 2006, after the government starts granting licenses for the service this year, the China Daily reported, citing Lu Guoying, an analyst with government-backed research company CCID Consulting. The establishment of so-called third-generation services, which enable mobile-phone users to hold video conferences over handsets and access the Internet at faster speeds, will create a new mobile-phone market worth about 100 billion yuan a year, the newspaper said. China's mobile-phone subscribers will exceed 400 million in 2006, up from last year's 269 million, the report said, citing data from the country's Ministry of Information Industry.
■ Gas
China pipeline faces delay
Russia may delay building a US$17 billion gas pipeline to China and South Korea by four years on concern there won't be enough demand in northeast China, which gets most of its energy from coal, a Russian government adviser said. Russia's gas pipeline monopoly OAO Gazprom wants to send gas from Siberia's Kovykta field, which has 10 times Asia's annual gas demand, to Western Europe instead and delay delivery to China until 2012, said Andrei Korzhubaev, an economist at the Institute of Petroleum Geology in Siberia. BP Plc, the field operator and Europe's biggest oil company, said government support may boost demand enough in the northeast to warrant its preferred route to China. The tussle with Gazprom, the world's biggest gas producer, is delaying supplies to China.
■ South Korea
Defaults likely to increase
Standard and Poor's said yesterday that South Korea's corporate and individual defaults may rise further, raising questions about trends in the country's credit quality. South Korea's corporate default rate hit a record high 133,195 in January, up 14 percent from a year earlier, according to the Korea Federation of Banks. Individual defaults also hit a record high, the international credit rating agency said without providing details. "In Korea, default rates are likely to continue to increase for some time," Standard and Poor's credit analyst Takahira Ogawa said. Since early last year, domestic demand was hit hard by credit card turmoil, the chief culprit behind South Korea's economic slump last year. In addition, higher costs stemming from global raw material prices and a rise in interest rates have also served to further depress the pace of economic growth, the credit ratings agency said.
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
INTENSIFYING THREATS: Beijing’s tactics include massive attacks on the government service network, aircraft and naval vessel incursions and damaging undersea cables China is prepared to interfere in November’s nine-in-one local elections by launching massive attacks on the Taiwanese government’s service network (GSN), a report published by the National Security Bureau showed. The report was submitted to the Legislative Yuan ahead of the bureau’s scheduled briefing at the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee tomorrow. The national security team has identified about 13,000 suspicious Internet accounts and 860,000 disputed messages, the bureau said of China’s cognitive warfare against Taiwan. The disputed messages focus on major foreign affairs, national defense and economic issues, which were produced using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed through Chinese
COUNTERING HOSTILITY: The draft bill would require the US to increase diplomatic pressure on China and would impose sanctions on those who sabotage undersea cable networks US lawmakers on Thursday introduced a bipartisan bill to bolster the resilience of Taiwan’s submarine cables to counter China’s hostile activities. The proposal, titled the critical undersea infrastructure resilience initiative act, was cosponsored by Republican representatives Mike Lawler and Greg Stanton, and Democratic Representative Dave Min. US Senators John Curtis and Jacky Rosen also introduced a companion bill in the US Senate, which has passed markup at the chamber’s Committee on Foreign Relations. The House’s version of the bill would prioritize the deployment of sensors to detect disruptions or potential sabotage in real-time and enhance early warning capabilities through global intelligence sharing frameworks,
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