Remember, for most countries (especially outside Western Europe and North America), the options when the monarchy fell are either authoritarian left (commie) or authoritarian right (military, not necessarily fascist).
Maybe you will have a brief democratic regime, but soon it will be toppled by one of the above. Democratic regime won’t last a cycle of election.
Western Europe and North America is already slipping towards authoritarian right.
Yes
I want 8-10% annual economic growth, not martial law.
I’d like to see this good news.
I asked for median. What about the median.
Also, eight-year high? You mean it was higher before?
I want 4-6% then. Give me 4-6%.
Can you share some examples of nations which match this criteria, now?
Guy
Countries with that kind of growth tends to be developing countries. That means a lot of third world stuff. Try going to Thailand or Cambodia or something. India is certainly developing.
An excellent breakdown by the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research, which I was told produces better numbers than the politically-charged DGBAS.
The opening line is, “Why the fruits of economic growth aren’t felt by everyone.”
Taiwan’s economy depends too much on semiconductors (半導體), which stands for (半個島考它養身體 harharhar). Manufacturing semiconductors is capital intensive, so money goes into machines and not salaries. I’ve heard that explanation mentioned here before. That’s why semiconductors don’t lift all boats.
Hmm…if you have more machines then labor productivity would go up as well, so wages should go up too (when productivity goes up wages should be going up, as I’ve demonstrated here). But I guess it doesn’t go as much as if most of the gains go into salaries, as is with services.
Furthermore, he said that TSMC doesn’t hire that many people (I thought they’ve got huge recruitment drives where they’re hiring thousands of people. They’re even hiring from outside the Big 4).
He said that it benefits only the 園區 (industrial park, i.e. science park). That’s why I have high hopes for Tainan.
Move to china then
That article title is misleading. It makes you think that chip execs are the ones buying Ferraris. It’s the chip wealth that’s making Taiwan rich and making Taiwan buy Ferraris indirectly.
This is another story he tells: When Taiwan’s export-processing jobs started leaving the country in the latter half of the 1980s, people in those jobs went into services. So there was an increase in service workers without a corresponding increase in demand for those services, driving the incomes of service jobs down.
The government made a policy “mistake” listening to the advice of a group of economists to upgrade the industry into capital- and skill-intensive jobs. These jobs are the opposites of the labor-intensive export-processing jobs. Salaries all went into capital owners and skilled workers, creating inequality.
He said this “problem” industrial upgrading wasn’t unique to Taiwan, and occurred in both China and the US, but it happened naturally in those cases. In Taiwan, it was a man-made problem.
There are a least a couple of problems with his analysis.
Free trade, while neoliberal, is hardly the boogeyman of the left or the panacea of the right. It can protect the environment, labour, sustainable development, and really enforce labour rights. Comprehensive or “new age” ones also heavily depend on specialized working groups, so in essence, the really liberalizing ones are highly dependent on bureaucrats and specialists to be effective.
1 Like
I didn’t like this explanation, because he assumes all wealth is in a vacuum, when it reality wealth trickles down.
The Digitimes founder said that the service sector should 想辦法 (think of a way) to make money from the tech sector. The service sector is the largest of Taiwan’s sectors, but it’s mostly low-income services, because the world doesn’t recognize Taiwan services value.
