The government is to raise childcare allowances by at least NT$1,500 (US$46.54) per month starting next year to try to boost the nation’s shrinking birthrate, the Executive Yuan said.
Starting on Jan. 1 next year, subsidies for parents with children younger than three attending public care centers are to be increased to NT$7,000 per month from NT$5,500, Premier Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) was quoted as saying in a statement issued by the Cabinet late on Monday.
Those using publicly subsidized private childcare centers or home babysitting services are to receive NT$13,000 a month, up from NT$8,500, it said.
Photo: Tien Yu-hua, Taipei Times
Additional childcare subsidies are to be offered to parents with two or three children and those from low-income or lower-middle-income families, it added.
The government budget for measures to counter the declining birthrate has grown from NT$15 billion in 2016 to a projected NT$120.1 billion next year, Chen said.
During that time, the number of new births has plummeted, falling from 193,844 in 2017 to 138,986 last year, Ministry of the Interior data showed.
New births in the first eight months of this year are trending slightly lower than last year, totaling only 88,935.
The number of births last year and early this year was likely affected by the spread of COVID-19 last year, when the pandemic was at its worst in the nation, but the downtrend has been steady since 2017.
Chen said the government would also inject NT$21.9 billion to fund tuition subsidies of at least NT$35,000 a year to all students at private universities starting in February next year to bridge the gap between private and public university tuition fees.
The average annual tuition fee at a public university is about NT$11,000, compared with NT$62,000 at private universities, Ministry of Education data showed.
The Cabinet’s latest announcement came in the wake of campaign pledges by New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate, earlier the same day aimed at encouraging people to have more children.
Hou promised that if he is elected to implement a one-time housing subsidy of NT$1 million for households in an income tax bracket below 30 percent with three or more children and who do not own property.
Currently, households with three children who are in an income tax bracket below 20 percent are entitled to a monthly subsidy of NT$7,000.
The nation’s low birthrate has been driven by people getting married and having children at an older age, and by housing and childcare costs soaring, Hou said.
If elected, he would also offer a one-time subsidy of NT$20,000 for women aged 30 to 40 to freeze their eggs, along with an annual egg storage fee subsidy of NT$2,000 for a period of five years, or a maximum total subsidy of NT$30,000, he said.
The policy could benefit 30,000 individuals and would have a budget of NT$900 million, he added.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
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
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues
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