That’s some dubious claim right there. To say Taiwan’s has only one competitive advantage is a gross misrepresentation.
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To be clear, 0 economic profits
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Economic profits vs. accounting profits, right?
Yes.
yes
What other real competitive advantages does Taiwan industry have? I’ve lived and/or worked here since the mid-90’s and haven’t seen any other significant industry-wide advantages.
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Taiwan has the whole supply chain in close proximity for one.
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Taiwan also has (or rather used to until recently) a surplus of STEM graduates.
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Taiwan has a very stable currency
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Taiwan has a low corruption, low tax and generally business friendly economy
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Problem is if you try to compete on price some other countries without morals could out compete you. So if you want to be set apart then compete on value, not price.
If it’s because they’re horrible engineers who don’t think out of the box then change that.
Having seen the quality of higher education here I’ll just say… the value of these stem degrees is severely questionable. The expression “worth less than the paper they’re printed on” comes to mind…
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Tsinghua and Jiaoda are among the leaders in publications in the top electrical engineering journal. One of them beat out MIT one year.
In the engineering category, Tsinghua was ranked #1 for “total publications,” meaning its name was attached to more engineering papers than any other institution. But in “normalized citation impact”—a measure of citations per paper that accounts for differences in publication year and research area—it ranked a paltry #186. On another qualitative category, “percentage of total publications among the 10% most cited,” it came in at #167.
Tsinghua’s ”global research reputation,” a measure based on surveys of researchers in a particular field, was #16 in the world, a respectable but not outstanding number. MIT remained #1 in that category, followed by UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Caltech.
The same pattern applies to the other Chinese universities in the engineering top 10. Zhejiang University, #4 on the final list, was third in total publications but #110 in global research reputation. Harbin Institute of Technology, the seventh-best engineering school according to US News, was #2 in total citations and #4 in total publications, but #130 and #157 in reputation and publications among the 10% most cited, respectively.
The quantity explanation shows that these universities still have a long way to go to match the prestige of their counterparts in the US. The US News data show, for example, that Chinese universities attract far fewer staff from abroad than American ones.
And then there’s this too:
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/11/19/a-research-scandal-in-china
Quantity over quality. The Chinese way.
Wrong Tsinghua, dude.
Then were you referring to the wrong university in terms of your MIT claim? Because Tsinghua in China was the one that got all the press about “beating MIT”.
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Yes, wrong university. The one in Taiwan. And I’m not sure it was Tsinghua, it could’ve been Jiaoda.
This book talks about it:
https://www.amazon.com/New-Argonauts-Regional-Advantage-Economy/dp/0674025660
Since that book was published in 2007, it couldn’t have been talking about what happened in 2015.
It was only the top journal, not total engineering publications.
Then I’m not sure what university you’re talking about. No Taiwan university that I’m aware of has received press for “beating MIT”.
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I’ll have to use interlibrary loan to get the book from the library again.
I should probably read it again anyway.
It has the story of the Acer founder who made a sales appointment to sell a microprocessor in the 80s. The guy thought he was talking about gardening equipment.
those rankings are generally garbage anyways
I’ve been to many a meeting with someone screeching about how we are just as good as Harvard, MIT, etc. What this does is preclude any open discussion of the problems here and meaningful ways to address them.
Of course there are exceptions.
But as to your example about “beating MIT” - especially if it’s from decades ago, it probably has little bearing on the state of universities here today.
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One decade. I’ll give you the exact year and figure once I check the book out from interlibrary loan.
Here are Taiwan’s competitive advantages:
- Taiwan has a lot of engineering Talent
- Taiwan has a lot strong b2b companies
- Taiwan has pretty decent research institutions
- Taiwanese are well educated and many have studied abroad at good universities
- Taiwanese do well when they go abroad. So many Taiwanese leading in Shanghai, San Francisco etc And also leading creatively
- Taiwan has a lot of money. It does and Taiwanese have a lot of money