Tue, May 15, 2007 page8

• Numbers game can't hide the truth

  • By Norman Yin 殷寶寧
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  Taiwan seems prone to a foolish phenomenon in which complex political problems are reduced to mere matters of numbers and decimal places. Last week, the opposition and ruling parties reached a rare consensus, passing amendments to the fourth and seventh articles of the Local Government Act (地方制度法). This allowed Taipei County, with a population of more than 2 million people, to be elevated to special municipality status. Prior to the official change, the county government will implement many of the regulations applying to the other special municipalities, such as the county council's session periods, personnel numbers and distribution of taxes, income and expenditure.

  Looking at population figures in the nation's counties and cities, the only locally governed entities with populations exceeding 2 million are Taipei, with 2.6 million people, and Taipei County, with a population of 3.7 million. The next largest is Taoyuan County with 1.9 million people, followed by Taichung County with 1.53 million and Kaohsiung City with 1.51 million.

  It's not difficult to see that the threshold of 2 million people was set specifically for Taipei County. In one move, it met the needs of local pan-blue and pan-green legislators seeking re-election in the year-end legislative elections and made the next four years much easier for incumbent Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) County Commissioner Chou Hsi-wei (周錫瑋), while former commissioner and outgoing Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) hoped to use it in his failed bid to become the Democratic Progressive Party's presidential candidate.

  The extent of urbanization is often seen as a measure of civic progress, but many formerly colonized countries that have become developing nations often bear the consequences of urban primacy.

  Urban primacy refers to a country or an area in which the size difference between the largest city and the other cities is too great. The measure is usually expressed as the ratio between the first and second-largest cities. Urban primacy results in most of the population and economic development opportunities being concentrated in a primary city, leading to severe regional unbalance.

  The primary city itself is negatively affected by overstretched public services, failing urban functionality, mass immigration from rural towns, weakening regional identity, cultural problems and deteriorating quality of life. This model, in which the rest of the country relies on the main city to pull it along, is detrimental to national development in the long run. Moreover, a collapse of the main city can produce a domino effect among the smaller ones.

  There is a common explanation that confuses cause with effect. According to this explanation, Taipei County has always served as a satellite and commuter community for Taipei City. This is often simplified into a simple matter of equality and resource distribution and the belief that the county should be given more resources to avoid a situation where the city gets the meat while Taipei County is left to gnaw on the bone. But it is precisely this flawed development model, in which Taipei is the primary city, that has created such large discrepancies.

  This is not unique to Taipei. The cities and counties of Kaohsiung, Tainan and Taichung have similar structures. But if we look at this issue based on the thinking behind the amendment to the Local Government Act, increasing the size of the local government administration and financial distribution based merely on population size while ignoring the overall national structure, Taipei City and Taipei County together with Keelung City and Taoyuan County could become a giant metropolis with more than 8.6 million people.

  This would mean that more than one-third of Taiwan's population would be concentrated in the north. This calculation exposes with abundant clarity the regional imbalance threatening Taiwan.

  Let's consider the issue from a global perspective based on concerns about global warming and sustainable development. Taiwan's carbon dioxide emissions are the 22nd-highest in the world, contributing about 1 percent of global emissions. This amounts to an average of 12.4 tonnes per person per year, putting the nation third in the world and first by population density.

  Over the past decade, Taiwan's carbon dioxide emissions have risen 8 percent each year, but GDP has only risen 4 percent. Figures show that at the end of last year, Taiwan's population density was 632 people per square kilometer, second only to Bangladesh among countries with more than 10 million people.

  In Taipei and Kaohsiung cities, there are almost 10,000 people per square kilometer. Excessive urbanization mass vehicle use, air conditioners, the urban heat-island effect (in which urban areas are significantly warmer than their surroundings) and garbage pollution are all major causes of environmental disaster in Taiwan.

  Meanwhile, concepts related to environmental sustainability, such as dispersal, decentralization and "small is beautiful," seek to shrink urban space to an appropriate level and reduce its population to cut back energy use.

  Just as when Kaohsiung City gained special municipality status in 1979 primarily to achieve "regional balance," Taiwan is today faced with the same kind of problem. The nation must reform its national land planning system by passing the proposed national land planning and town and country planning acts which have been stalled for more than a decade. It must implement effective policy tools for city planning management, development licenses and land use, and it must also restructure the local administration system.

  In Taichung, for example, the city should be merged with the county to become a special municipality. Not only would this encourage regional balance, but it could have an overall economic impact by being integrated with the transportation network created by the Taiwan High Speed Rail.

  Moreover, Taiwan should fully consider the sustainable use of national land resources, balanced regional and urban-rural development, improving quality of life, economic development and public welfare. Such expert legislation would be far superior to the numbers game being played by both camps to override the Cabinet's efforts to adjust the administrative organizations countrywide. These issues really deserve our attention.

  Norman Yin is a professor of financial studies at National Chengchi University.

  Translated by Marc Langer
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