The real estate market should see a limited rise in prices in the long term given stagnant income growth, but it is unlikely to nose-dive in the near term even though Taiwan is experiencing a housing bubble now, a National Science Council report said yesterday.
The report attributed the root cause of soaring housing prices to the repatriation of funds by overseas Taiwanese businesspeople following a reduction in inheritance and gift taxes, as well as public expectations of further trade liberation across the Taiwan Strait.
National Chengchi University economics professor Steve Lin (林祖嘉), one of the authors of the report, said that Taiwan is experiencing a housing bubble that is bigger than the one in the US that burst in 2008 and triggered a global financial crisis.
“There’s still plenty of capital flowing into the local property market. I don’t think housing prices will immediately drop unless the government adopts very strict measures,” Lin said.
However, since a majority of the public cannot afford to buy homes as salaries have failed to keep pace with the surge in property prices, housing prices are unlikely to continue rising in the long term, he said.
Lin said that the US real estate bubble burst because of a sharp government-led hike in interest rates from 1 percent to 5 percent.
In contrast, Taiwan’s central bank has kept interest rates low and only adopted selective credit controls to rein in housing prices, he said.
“Just because there’s a housing bubble doesn’t mean that it will necessarily burst,” he said, voicing support for the government’s “mild” measures to curb rising prices.
Lin also blamed rampant property speculation and opaque real estate information for the sharp increase in prices, urging the government to introduce legislation on publicizing property transactions and levying housing taxes based on the actual price of the property.
Moreover, he said that the government should speed up urban renewal projects and transportation infrastructure in the suburbs to increase housing supply and halt soaring property prices.
In response to concerns that expanding transportation networks seemed to fuel housing price hikes, Lin said it’s just a “short-term phenomenon,” adding that property prices would eventually go down when housing supply becomes sufficient.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
RSS