The index of leading indicators for last month is likely to show a downgraded “yellow-blue” light amid a gloomy global economy, the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER, 台灣經濟研究院) forecast yesterday.
The Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) is scheduled to release the monthly economic indicators tomorrow.The August-September period is usually a busy export season, but the debt crises in the US and Europe have made the situation “chaotic,” said Gordon Sun (孫明德), deputy director of the economic forecasting center at the TIER, an independent non-profit research organization.
According to the TIER, high-tech exports to the Western Hemisphere decreased last month compared with the same time last year.
Meanwhile, the tight monetary policy in China has affected exports to China, mostly in the traditional industries of cement and construction, the TIER’s deputy director said.
The TIER projected that the council report would show a downgraded “yellow-blue” light for last month, although the business indicators for July continued to flash an optimistic “green light” for the fifth consecutive month.
Among the nine components of the overall index, the stock prices indicator, the industrial production indicator and the customs-cleared exports indicator are likely to drop one notch, the TIER forecast.
Last week, the Ministry of Economic Affairs reported that export orders increased 5.26 percent year-on-year last month to US$36.71 billion, which was the slowest in nearly 22 months, while the industrial production index rose 3.88 percent year-on-year last month, also a sharp drop from the double-digit growth seen early this year.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) yesterday said Taiwan’s government plans to set up a business service company in Kyushu, Japan, to help Taiwanese companies operating there. “The company will follow the one-stop service model similar to the science parks we have in Taiwan,” Kuo said. “As each prefecture is providing different conditions, we will establish a new company providing services and helping Taiwanese companies swiftly settle in Japan.” Kuo did not specify the exact location of the planned company but said it would not be in Kumamoto, the Kyushu prefecture in which Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC, 台積電) has a
RSS