Taiwan ranked sixth in this year’s Index of Economic Freedom, the same as last year, but its overall score gained 1.5 points to 80.1, joining the “Free” index category for the first time, thanks to improvements in judicial effectiveness and labor freedom, the Heritage Foundation said in an annual survey released yesterday.
The US think tank grades 12 indicators in 184 economies — from property rights to financial freedom — grouped into four categories: rule of law; government integrity; judicial effectiveness; and regulatory efficiency and open market.
“Taiwan is one of the few countries in the world to have experienced continuous economic growth during the past five years. Economic freedom has increased significantly during that period as well,” the Washington-based foundation said.
Photo: CNA
Taiwan ranked third among 39 nations in the Asia-Pacific region and its overall score was higher than the regional and global averages, the foundation said.
By comparison, South Korea was ranked 19th, Japan 35th and China 158th.
With strong scores across the board inflated by improved judicial effectiveness and labor freedom, Taiwan recorded a 3.6 point gain in economic freedom since 2017, it said.
The National Development Council said the government’s efforts to pursue economic freedom had paid off, adding that Taiwan now lags behind Luxembourg and New Zealand by just 0.5 points. Singapore leads the survey, followed by Switzerland and Ireland.
Taiwan’s judicial effectiveness scored 94.2, an increase of 21.3 points from a year earlier, the council said, adding that the nation gained 10 points in investment freedom to 70 and added 8.3 points to labor freedom at 68.7.
Taiwan’s currency freedom picked up 1.8 points to 86.1, but it lost points in business freedom, property rights, government integrity, government spending and fiscal health, the survey showed.
Additional improvements in business freedom and financial freedom would propel Taiwan’s economic freedom even higher, the foundation said.
Taiwan put up a flat showing in trade freedom and financial freedom from the previous year, it said.
Taiwan has six preferential trade agreements in force with the trade-weighted average tariff rate at 2 percent and 391 non-tariff measures in effect. Some agricultural imports face extra barriers, the survey found.
As of Dec. 1 last year, Taiwan had reported 848 deaths attributable to COVID-19 and the government’s response to the pandemic ranked 94th among nations in terms of its stringency, it said.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday received representatives from the Heritage Foundation, including founder Edwin Feulner Jr and research fellow Anthony Kim, at the Presidential Office in Taipei.
Tsai outlined the government’s efforts and achievements in creating a more open economy and liberalized trade, and said she expects a closer Taiwan-US relationship in light of upcoming free-trade and digital economy talks between Taipei and Washington.
Feulner said that Taiwan is an important ally and a cornerstone of the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy.
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has