What is holding up Taiwan becoming a real developed country?

taiwan’s per capita gdp income is still not high enough to be considered a developed country. it’s still not on the same level as the u.s., singapore,germany, etc. those countries are above US$30,000. taiwan’s been hovering around $20k for a long while now. even south korea has surpassed $20k. i know in per capita ppp terms taiwan’s is high - higher than japan’s. but some people dont consider that an accurate system. plus much of the country still looks like a third world backwater country - including even taipei. nobody appreciates or values good quality architecture and a nice looking, clean landscape and environment. the population still have that poor country bumpkin mentality. they live on the cheap and frugally and like everything to be dirt cheap, e.g, food/dining out. businessmen run companies on the cheap, e.g., lack of big investments in innovation and r&d, lack of big marketing budget - htc and acer being great examples. just my :2cents: opinion of a non-economist layman. :bow:

I’ve always felt “developed” is a very subjective concept. There are many concrete metrics and even more debate on whether or not they are relevant. In some ways, Taiwan is very developed, but the economy seems to me to still be very immature, particularly in regard to what forealz pointed out with lack of R&D and innovation. Instead of looking at the cities, I think we should look at the countryside. In many parts of the world (particularly Western Europe and North America) it’s very conceivable you could make a decent living out in the countryside. Not rich by any real standard, but able to get by comfortably and enjoy some of the finer things in life. I just really don’t see that being a possibility in 99% of rural Taiwan.

someone should run for office with that in mind.

income in the countryside has dropped I believe as factories closed down en masse. People in the cities and neighboring environs did much better as land values exploded while jobs still remained relatively abundant.
Small farm size and advent of WHO was also damaging. Population collapse in countryside has exacerbated the problem as this cause vicious cycle of negative growth and lack of investment. Of course not all places are the same, mainly talking about West coast and Sourh here. Revenue is not shared equally in Taiwan, as metro areas can claim larger share of central revenue!

Similar phenomenon has happened overseas too but Taiwan’s countryside is also densely populated and degraded so its hard to compare. A town here could be a city somewhere else!

In terms of population and urban development, sure, but not in terms of infrastructure and economy – and the one I care about the most, local identity and culture.

Yep, cities and towns here tend to have little sense of cultural identity.

One thing I’ve often wondered is why, whenever they have the inevitable match-fixing scandals in baseball, don’t they completely redo the competition and make it into a city thing. Instead of the Uni-President 7-11 Lions, you’d have the Tainan Lions. And so on for all cities. Get some local patriotism and rivalries happening, and local people would begin to take ownership of their teams making match-fixing less likely.

They did something similar in Australia for football (soccer) - changed from ethnic based local teams (where most of the teams were based on old European rivalries) that caused all sorts of problems and turned regular folk off, and made it city based and it became more popular than they imagined. Something similar would work for baseball here, and would create some local identity for each town / city.

Taiwan isn’t doing too bad on this list:

https://expatexplorer.hsbc.com/#/countries

The answer to the question in the title: stupidity.

That’s a pretty lame response to a very legitimate question. Are you really going to tell me that Taiwanese people are dumber than Koreans and that’s what is holding Taiwan back? Or that all of Europe and North America are smart and only Taiwan is dumb? You need a reality check.

[quote=“cfimages”]One thing I’ve often wondered is why, whenever they have the inevitable match-fixing scandals in baseball, don’t they completely redo the competition and make it into a city thing. Instead of the Uni-President 7-11 Lions, you’d have the Tainan Lions. And so on for all cities. Get some local patriotism and rivalries happening, and local people would begin to take ownership of their teams making match-fixing less likely.

They did something similar in Australia for football (soccer) - changed from ethnic based local teams (where most of the teams were based on old European rivalries) that caused all sorts of problems and turned regular folk off, and made it city based and it became more popular than they imagined. Something similar would work for baseball here, and would create some local identity for each town / city.[/quote]

Those are actually two separate issues. You are absolutely right about the need for teams to focus on a home city market. Any team professional sport is about team image, and quality of the facilities. Without a home market focus, the teams wouldn’t try to make a stadium unique or spend money to improve the stadiums. The cities here in Taiwan have no desire to maintain the stadium much less improving it. It is far more profitable for the city officials to let the stadiums get run down, then spend a ridiculous amount of money to do superficial touch ups. Besides, a city runs on budgets, and since they only dedicate budgets once an year, if say the jumbotron (technically the monitors here in Taiwan are not big enough to be called that) gets broken half way through the season, it won’t get fixed at least until the end of next year.

I can go on and on about the benefits of cultivating home city markets… but let just say Lamigo Monkeys are on the right track, and they are finally showing other teams that this is the right way to do professional team sports.

The only thing that having a real home city that relates to curbing game fixing is that if the teams are more profitable, and an entire city supports them and the players feel respected and well paid, then they would be less willing to cooperate in game fixings.

However, the real driver behind game fixing are the local mobsters and their crime boss who happens to be local elected officials. The real way to stop game fixing in Taiwan would be similar to what people did in the US and Japan after the black soxs and black fog episodes, which is the police began harsh and swift crack downs and make it known to the mobsters that sports is off limits.

Instead, since 1997, every game fixing scandal here in Taiwan resulted in a massive amounts of top talents banned from baseball forever, while all the crime boss and their minions, including police officers gets off by paying a fraction of what they make per a fixed game. Many players have their safety, lives and families threatened, and forced to choose between a cookie box filled with money or a bullet. In both the pre-1997 and 2005 cases, entire teams were taken away at knife and gun point to some random hotel to be threatened. They had no real choice in the matter. Of course some players did do it willingly for the money, but without stopping the crime organizations and their reach into local politics, just tarnishing generation after generation of the best players of Taiwan would do little to end game fixing.

If you think about it, this is exactly what’s happening in the food safety scandals. The real perpetrators, those who imports inferior oil and who makes them to pass them off as edible are untouched or fined for a tiny amount of money, while those who use that oil in their end products are put out of business, where they really had and still have no way of avoiding such things.

It’s a systematic failure, much like everything else wrong with Taiwan, from city planning, to not having fair and efficient trials. And everyone is either too busy making a profit out of the situation or too busy trying to sort out the national identity issue, which makes every other issue secondary.

taiwan doesnt even have a developed and mature financial industry on a par to that of hong kong and singapore. taiwan’s economy is too narrowly focused on a few industries, namely hi-tech/science and hardware production/manufacturing. businessmen and companies still stubbornly rely on oem manufacturing products for foreign brands instead of building home grown brands (besides htc, acer and asus) into global companies like south korea and japan who build conglomerates that try to dominate global markets. the companies that taiwan does produce like htc and acer are just followers, not leaders, that always follow/copy the lead of other foreign companies like apple who genuinely innovate and create new technology and services. other developed countries have many more industries, e.g, finance, health care, arts/culture, software, military/defense, advertising/marketing, entertainment/media, sports, etc. look at how many industries there are in the u.s. and how much wealth it’s created for people who work in those industries. i blame the education system and narrow-minded parenting that focus on rote memorization instead of “thinking outside the box” and training and pushing students into just a few select fields, namely science and engineering, that produces a workforce who lack creative thinking and just copycat.

That’s not how I meant it.

Lots of small countries successfully concentrate on a few industries, unfortunately Taiwan hasn’t developed new industries (excepting tourism) to help replace the aging OEM model of its industrial model and has done poorly in service industries overall , not helped by political and economic isolation.
That said Hsinchu does pretty well for itself with many relatively high paying jobs and successful companies still.

I really don’t think this is a problem with the workforce but the working culture. Management is inflexible and will not delegate decision making so of course people aren’t creative. If you look around at small businesses you see lots of creativity and innovation. In just ten years for example Taiwanese roasters and baristas have made a name for themselves worldwide. In Coffee Reviews top 200 coffees of the world, at east half a dozen come from Taiwanese companies.

I really don’t think this is a problem with the workforce but the working culture. Management is inflexible and will not delegate decision making so of course people aren’t creative. If you look around at small businesses you see lots of creativity and innovation. In just ten years for example Taiwanese roasters and baristas have made a name for themselves worldwide. In Coffee Reviews top 200 coffees of the world, at east half a dozen come from Taiwanese companies.[/quote]

what roasters are taiwanese?? that 85deg (whatever) chain? ive only seen one in irvine, ca. compare that to starbucks which is truly an international chain. and you have to admit the education system is a big part of the problem. it’s great that taiwanese students are very studious and hardworking - along with koreans, chinese, japanese - and always score top ten globally in math and science tests and win many math/science competitions, etc. it’s a great foundation to start off at because it is important to know the basics. but schools have to diversify their curriculum and their ways of teaching to also allow students to take different types of classes like arts, music, theater, design, sports, etc. it teaches students to be more creative and social, vocal and expressive which is important in business. it can even build up their confidence. they need to be allowed to speak out/debate with teachers and other students so that they can think independently and creatively and share ideas. i read this wall street journal article a while back about the ceo of vizio who is a taiwanese -american who said that had he grown up in taiwan he would not have been able to build vizio into as big a success as it is. he probably wouldve been another no-name oem manufacturer using cheap chinese labor to build products for foreign companies. let me try to find it.

btw, the school uniforms in taiwan are atrociously ugly. they all wear oversized pastel colored sweatsuits. public schools should get rid of mandatory uniforms and only make private school students wear them. the uniforms in japan look much better. being able to dress your own way and express yourself via fashion is a good way to foster creativity.

Haha uniforms that’s funny.

I think self expression is a great point though. Just saw some teenagers
doing some drills in the park. almost all the group activities they do are drills with a leader leading them in all the actions. Good coordination but bad for creativity and individual expression. The school system here though is very different than the West.
You will see students walking around the teachers desks and interacting
with the teachers more outside class, it’s hard to generalize.

this is a really great commercial from vizio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=ojw4D7hA81E it’s been playing on network tv channels, cnn and other major stations here in the u.s. it’s short and effective and waaaaay better than those stupid htc commercials with gary oldman and robert downey jr. that barely even show the htc one smartphone they’re supposed to be selling. i dont even see any commercials for acer or asus. compare that to the billions of dollars that samsung and lg spends on marketing. koreans just seem to get it and do it more successfully; they do emulate japan and the u.s. more. taiwanese really need to value marketing more and improve their skills. the marketing curriculum at taiwanese colleges are probably severely subpar compared to marketing curriculums at colleges in the west. sorry for going off on a tangent but just sharing my :2cents: :bow:

I am talking specialty coffee guys not chains. But you criticize the Taiwanese for lacking creativity and then suggest they remedy this by creating chains of identikit cafes? :laughing: :wink:

This Commonwealth article is pretty scathing in its comparison of Korea with Taiwan:

[quote]The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Asian Career Fair in early March had a distinctly Chinese and Japanese flavor. The Ping An Group and Baidu from China, Toshiba from Japan, and even local-level research agencies like the Wenzhou Institute of Biomaterials and Engineering had representatives there. But among the many multinational enterprises and organizations that had a presence at the fair, not a single one was from Taiwan.

MIT’s renowned “Media Lab,” home of the innovation that spurred Google Glass, often brings change to the world through the most cutting-edge research and applications. It attracts about NT$1.3 billion in research funds every year from nearly 80 companies.

The list of sponsors includes renowned companies from many different fields, as diverse as Gucci, Bloomberg and Microsoft. More recently, the biggest contributions have come from Asian corporations, such as Chinese electronics vendor TCL Corporation, Japanese consumer electronics brand Panasonic, Singaporean telecom operator Singtel and South Korean electronics giant Samsung.

Electronics stalwarts from China, Japan, South Korea and Singapore all sponsor the Media Lab program, but, again, Taiwanese companies are nowhere to be seen, an illustration of how Taiwan has fallen behind in the fierce fight for the world’s top young minds.

[/quote]

english.cw.com.tw/article.do?act … w&id=14806