Domestic households paid an additional NT$2,610 to eat out last year, reflecting higher consumer prices while wages continue to stagnate, government statistics released on Saturday showed.
The Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said that dining-out costs rose 3.61 percent year-on-year last year largely because of rising food prices, which grew 3.74 percent from the previous year.
Higher food and dining-out costs made the relatively lower consumer price index (CPI) growth seem insignificant to some consumers.
Last year, CPI rose by just 1.2 percent — the sixth consecutive year it has risen by less than 2 percent — while fuel costs and prices of non-food items, such as communications services and information technology devices, went down.
The DGBAS said that a household that spends NT$60,000 a month paid NT$2,610 more to eat out last year than in 2013.
Among the most popular restaurants in Taiwan, Formosa Chang (鬍鬚張), a traditional Taiwanese cuisine chain, raised the price of its braised pork rice to NT$35 from NT$33 in July.
It was the third price increase for Formosa Chang last year.
PORK HIKES
Many other braised pork rice suppliers also raised their prices to between NT$30 and NT$45 from about NT$25.
According to a recent news report, about 85 percent of people in Taiwan aged from 20 to 65 dined out at least once a day.
The DGBAS said that based on the rigid pricing characteristics of restaurants and eateries, once dining-out costs go up, it is unlikely that consumers would see the prices come down, even when fuel prices fall.
FUEL PRICES
Due to a steep decline in international crude oil prices, household fuel spending fell by about NT$856 last year, the DGBAS said.
The price of a basket of 17 household necessities — including rice, pork, bread, eggs, sugar, cooking oil, shampoo and toilet paper — monitored by the Cabinet rose 5.35 percent last year, its highest rise since 2008, when the price of the items rose 13.65 percent.
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