The article says don’t believe the KMT about the economy , what’s the truth ?
The truth is: fear sells.
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The is obviously the issue. The article does a good job finishing with this point.
There is also the fact that while the macro-economic outlook is extremely positive, for the ordinary voter who works a regular job and takes home a regular salary, little has changed in the past few years. Cost of living is still an issue, buying a house is out of the question for many people, and wages have remained broadly stagnant.
The economic progress that Taiwan has made on paper has not yet filtered down to ordinary workers, and this is something that Tsai absolutely needs to prioritize should she win a second term in office.
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Taiwan’s economy is doing well. But most people will never notice because their salary is not going up. Imagine France’s GDP growing 3% YoY. All the unions would make sure that salaries increase by around 3% as well. You don’t have that in Taiwan.
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GDP also been growing fairly steadily for 20 Years except for the financial crisis . Failure of society here. The kmt looked after govt workers, dpp business…And Taiwanese society is very poor at organising beyond the blue/ green agenda.
This affected all of us who work here, mostly negatively I think. .
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When is the election and what do the polls currently say?
No new polling allowed since last week.
So, what did they say last week?
The lastest polls show Tsai leading by 16% to 33%. If it’s closer to 16% and voting turnout is low, then Tsai may be in trouble.
However, the real determining factor of Taiwan’s future is the legislative seats. Assuming the TPP is blue and NPP is green, the pro-China camp would still be up by 2 to 3 seats.
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This applies to pretty much every developed economy. We were successfully hoodwinked by the trickle down theory.
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I think a lot of that was fighting China on price rather than quality/added value.
I’m trying not to be argumentative (and correct as usual 
) but Taiwan had a very unusual slowdown in wages growth vs GDP growth in the 2000s and continuining up to mid 2010s.
I’ll try and dig up the relevant stats to demonstrate this. Taiwan did not follow the worldwide trend and especially Asian trends.
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Here’s one article, I’m trying to find the charts.
Personally I believe it was mainly the almost complete lack of real foreign investment into Taiwan after the year 2000, along with a massive migration of electronics manufacturers and others around the year 2000. Anybody here at the time and active in business would be aware how many foreign businessmen started doing their business directly with China at that time and not bothering about Taiwan.
This was compounded by lack of very successful large high valued added local corporations in Taiwan since the 2000s, recently at least TSMC has been making a big impact.
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One big problem is the low minimum wage which did not increase at all for 10 years between 1996 and 2006. Taiwan went from relatively high min wage to very low min wage. Tsai is trying to fix that problem, slowly.
Of course the low min wage means lots of staff in cheap restaurants, gas station attendants making sure you don’t have to gas up yourself, etc. If Taiwan were to have the South Korean min wage (i.e. double the current one), that stuff would change for sure.
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Taiwan’s definitely an odd case. In the UK real wages are lower now than in 2008, but wage growth is starting to pick up. That growth may stall again with continued Brexit uncertainty.
Generally, millennials are the first generation to be considerably worse off than their parents were in every developed country, I believe, so this phenomenon of workers not benefiting from macro-economic growth seems to be universal. I agree that this is particularly pronounced in Taiwan. The starting salaries my students expect when they graduate are unlivable IMO.
We also have to understand GBP devalued substantially but TWD never devalued . Just something to consider.
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That minimum wage graph is incorrect. Korea’s minimum wage is only 50% more than Taiwan’s.
The economy is better. But it’s not booming, this hyperbole is making me sick. Taishang have come back and Taiwan is doing well because of trade war. The same structural problems are still here.
This is a golden opportunity for Taiwan and will be wasted of goes back to business as normal.
Also tourism isn’t doing well. Most of the tourists came from China in 2019. Wish people would stop spouting bullshit
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It seems to be doing pretty well all around Taipei at least. Other areas maybe the gross numbers are down a bit at the night markets and tourist traps but …how many night markets can we have and need anyway .
How many buses do we want jamming Alishan or Taroko. Also tonnes of domestic tourists as per usual.
Sure, it’s doing OK. But it’s not getting better. Tourist spends are going down and the number of international tourists will be lower in 2020. The first half of 2019 was good when then China 自由行 was still in operation.