Household disposable income last year averaged NT$1.09 million (US$35,014), rising 1 percent from 2020, while median household disposable income edged up 0.1 percent to NT$929,000, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said on Wednesday.
Average disposable per capita income advanced 2.1 percent to NT$377,000, while median per capita income gained 1.8 percent to NT$326,000, the agency said.
Average household income is used to help gauge the monetary well-being of a country’s citizens. Median household incomes are taken as indicators of standard of living because they include only disposable income and acknowledge that people sharing accommodation benefit from pooling at least some of their living costs.
Taipei led other special municipalities in household disposable income at NT$1.43 million, followed by Taoyuan, New Taipei City, Taichung, Kaohsiung and Tainan, the agency said.
However, people spent less for two consecutive years, as most stayed home to avoid infection during COVID-19 outbreaks.
Disease control measures also affected social gatherings and recreational activities, the DGBAS said.
INCOME GAP
The income gap last year rose to 6.15 times, a 10-year high, as the rich benefited from capital gains, another DGBAS survey showed.
The income difference for 2020 stood at 6.13 times, it said.
The liquidity-driven rallies across global financial markets last year significantly inflated asset prices for the wealthy.
However, the widening gap should not be linked to the COVID-19 pandemic as the government introduced waves of relief measures and subsidy programs to support affected people and businesses, the agency said.
The income of the top 1 percent in Taiwan accounted for a relatively low percentage of overall income compared with other countries, it added.
This time was supposed to be different. The memorychip sector, famous for its boom-and-bust cycles, had changed its ways. A combination of more disciplined management and new markets for its products — including 5G technology and cloud services — would ensure that companies delivered more predictable earnings. Yet, less than a year after memory companies made such pronouncements, the US$160 billion industry is suffering one of its worst routs ever. There is a glut of the chips sitting in warehouses, customers are cutting orders and product prices have plunged. “The chip industry thought that suppliers were going to have better control,” said
Enimmune Corp (安特羅生技) has obtained marketing approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its EnVAX-A71 vaccine for enterovirus 71 (EV-71), becoming the nation’s first enterovirus vaccine completely made in Taiwan, it said yesterday. After spending 13 years and NT$1.5 billion (US$49.77 million) on the research and development of the vaccine, Enimmune plans to start manufacturing and marketing it by the end of March, the company said in a statement, without disclosing customer order figures. “It is possible that the vaccine would not be included in a national vaccination program initially, and consumers would need to pay for it themselves,” parent
Vaccine skeptics blocking transfusions for life-saving surgeries, Facebook groups inciting violence against doctors and a global search for unvaccinated donors — COVID-19 misinformation has bred a so-called “pure blood” movement. The movement spins anti-vaccine narratives focused on unfounded claims that receiving blood from people inoculated against COVID-19 “contaminates” the body. Some have advocated for blood banks that draw from “pure” unvaccinated people, while medics in North America say they have fielded requests from people demanding transfusions from donors who have not received a vaccine. In closed social media groups, vaccine skeptics — who brand themselves as “pure bloods” — promote violence against doctors
Asteroid mining start-up AstroForge Inc is planning to launch its first two missions to space this year as it seeks to extract and refine metals from deep space. The first launch, scheduled for April, is to test AstroForge’s technique for refining platinum from a sample of asteroid-like material. The second, planned for October, would scout for an asteroid near Earth to mine. The missions are part of AstroForge’s goal of refining platinum-group metals from asteroids, with the aim of bringing down the cost of mining these metals. It also hopes to reduce the massive amount of carbon emissions that stem from mining
RSS