The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday downplayed the potential adverse impact of the cross-strait service trade agreement, while academics and industry representatives called on the government to conduct a thorough reassessment to ensure Taiwanese service providers’ rights are safeguarded.
“International trade agreements are signed on the condition that there is always give and take from the countries at the negotiating table,” Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Bill Cho (卓士昭) said at forum in Taipei. “While Taiwan is facing difficulties in fostering GDP growth, lowering barriers to international trade is absolutely necessary for the country.”
Cho said the goal of the cross-strait service trade agreement is to help local service providers explore new markets. He also said the Taiwanese service sector as a whole could gain more than it loses from the deal.
General Chamber of Commerce chairman Lawrence Chang (張平沼) told the forum that Taiwanese service providers should take advantage of the opportunities offered by the trade agreement and that they need to think positively that “competition pushes firms to make headway.”
Jan Hung-tze (詹宏志), chairman of online shopping Web site PChome Online Inc (網絡家庭), on Tuesday said the trade agreement “opened a small window” for Taiwan’s e-commerce sector, because it allows Taiwanese firms to establish branches in Fujian Province, China, but that he was not satisfied because Taiwanese service providers still face barriers to entering the Chinese market, despite the pact.
Cho said the market value of the Taiwanese service sector accounts for almost 70 percent of the nation’s GDP, while in China it makes up about 45 percent of GDP, stressing that “there is huge growth potential in China’s service sector” which should encourage Taiwanese firms to explore Chinese markets.
To lessen concerns that increased Chinese investment would take away job opportunities for Taiwanese, Cho said the ministry has adopted strict standards when evaluating applications for Chinese investment in Taiwan under the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), adding that the government has only granted 216 Chinese requests from a total of 398 applications received by the end of last month.
Cho did not release data on how many Taiwanese firms had invested in China and created job opportunities for Chinese under the ECFA, which is also one of the public’s concern over cross-strait trade agreements.
National Taiwan University economics professor Kenneth Lin (林向愷) told the Taipei Times by telephone that the service trade agreement’s economic advantages had been overestimated by the government.
“The pact will bring a great number of cultural impacts,” Lin said. “Services are untradeable in theory and therefore it’s better to leave them in their original form so that those that have distinct Taiwanese features can be preserved.”
From a cultural perspective, once the door is opened to Chinese investment in all of Taiwan’s service sector, the impact would be huge, Lin said.
He added that because Taiwanese and Chinese, though they use the same language, have different lifestyles the agreement would do little to invigorate the domestic market, where only Taiwanese vendors know what local buyers want.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS