The government is planning to spend NT$36 billion (US$1.11 billion) over the next nine years as part of its Productivity 4.0 project to elevate Taiwan’s status in the global supply chain, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said yesterday.
Over the period, the government is to spend NT$4 billion each year on electronics and information technology, metals, transportation, machinery, foodstuffs, textiles, distribution and agriculture, helping to build smart factories to realize massive, but diversified production, Ma said.
It is hoped that by 2024, the per capita productivity of the nation’s manufacturing industries might have grown 60 percent compared with last year, to NT$10 million, Ma said.
The commercial sector is expected to attain per capita productivity growth of 40 percent by 2024, which amounts to NT$2.3 million, while the target for the agricultural sector is 70 percent growth, bringing its per capita productivity to NT$2 million, Ma said.
The US, Germany and Japan have all taken measures to attract and retain high-end manufacturing on home soil and Taiwan is also working toward that goal so as not to fall behind competitors, the president told visiting Harvard University professor Dale Jorgenson.
Jorgenson, a neoclassical economist who received the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association in 1971, is in Taipei to deliver a keynote speech at an Asian conference on productivity.
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