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Taiwan Jobs Sucked to Chinaby Failure to Mimic SingaporeEconomic Model
By Chinmei Sung - Jul 4, 2011
A decade ago, Wu Wen-nan earned $726 a month at a Taiwan factory run by Foxconn Technology Group, maker of Apple Inc.’s iPhones and iPads. Today, he peddles magazines and takes handouts from a charity.
“I lost my job after the company moved production lines to China,”said Wu, 47, as he sold copies of “Big Issue” magazine by a Taipei subway stop. Homeless for much of the past year, he’s been unemployed since losing his Foxconn job 10 years ago. “I don’t have the skills needed for the big change.”
Wu belongs to a generation of Taiwanese who relied on the island’s success as a manufacturing center, from clothing and Mattel Inc.’s Barbie dolls in the 1960s to computers and HTC Corp. (2498) mobilephones in the past three decades. Policy makers’ slowness in easing investmentrules and boosting finance, transport and tourism has hampered the creation ofnew jobs and restrained income growth.
As warmer ties with former civil-war foe China encourage an exodus of factories to the lower-cost mainland, Taiwan’s failure to develop new growth industries has caused it to fall behind Singapore and Hong Kong.That has bolstered opposition claims that the economic embrace with China championed by President Ma Ying-jeou has hurt workers. He is running neck-and-neck with opposition leader Tsai Ing-wen ahead of the January election.
“Taiwan has done too little, too late,” said Chu Wan-wen,a research fellow in Taipeiat government-funded institute Academia Sinica and author of “Globalization andthe Taiwan Economy.” “Taiwan’s competence in the service sector is quite limited because it opened up the sector too late.”
While electronics manufacturers including HTC and Foxconn benefit from producing at a lower cost on the mainland and reachingthe Chinese market, Taiwanese companies tied to the domestic market, such as retailer Uni-PresidentEnterprises Corp. (1216), have reported smaller sales gains.
The island ended a mainland-investmentban in 1991. Since then, officials have approved 38,685 projects, creating anestimated total of at least 7.7 million jobs in China, data compiled by the Economy Ministry’s Investment Commission show. Foxconn alone employs more than 1million people in China.By comparison, Taiwan had 2.9 million manufacturing jobs as of May.
Taiwan’s unemployment rate of 4.4 percent,while less than half that of the U.S., compares unfavorably to competitor economies. It’s more than twice as high as Singapore’s and exceeds levels in Hong Kongand South Korea, which along with Taiwanform the International Monetary Fund’s group of newly industrialized economies.
Joblessness is about four times higher than alow reached three decades ago, while household income adjusted for inflationwas lower in 2010 than in 2000.
“It’s not a cyclical problem, it’s a structural problem,” said Mark Williams, an economist at CapitalEconomics Ltd. in London and a former adviser on China to the U.K. Treasury. “A lot of big employers have moved across the Taiwan Strait, and there have not been enough new job creations to offset that.”
While Singapore and Hong Kong have also seen a decline in the importance of manufacturing to their economies, Singapore has lured pharmaceutical and biotechnology investments, and opened two casinos, to spur growth. Hong Kong has attracted China’s biggest companies to list on its stock exchange.
“The government needs to speed up to shift its economy from low-margin,low-value manufacturing services to high-margin, high-value services,” said Wu Chung-Shu, chief economist at Taipei-based Chinatrust Commercial Bank and a former consultant at the Asian Development Bank.
Another competitiveness hurdle is a relative lack of English compared with Hong Kong and Singapore, which were British colonies. Wu, the former Foxconn worker, said“I don’t have a good education, I don’tknow English.”
“Taiwan isn’t a very internationalized place,” said Scott Chen, an economist at BankSinoPac in Taipei.“Its English proficiency trails behind that in Hong Kong and Singapore,and when multinationals want to set up their Asia centers, Taiwan isalways a low priority.”
Ma, 60, is trying to stoke growth by allowing more Chinese tourists to visit as he aims for re-election on a platform of improved economic ties with China. Taiwan allowed organized Chinese tour groups to start coming in 2008 and on June 28 let individual travelers from the mainland visit for the first time in more than six decades. The tourism bureau expects visitors from its neighbor to increase about 29 percent this year to as many as 2.1 million.
The Taiex Tourist Index, which tracks eight companies, has surged 30 percent in the past year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. “We are expecting the contribution of mainland visitors to Taiwan’s service sector to pick up exponentially,” said Donna Kwok, an economist in Hong Kong at HSBC Holdings Plc., Europe’s biggest bank. “Not only do we expect them to spend more on retail, but increasingly a future avenue of growth could include mainland visitors spending more in termsof medical services, education services, and other services inside the economy.”
A former student at the London School of Economics, where she earned a doctorate in law, Tsai has yet to specify her own economic program or outline how she would boost jobs.
“My main concern with Taiwan is that the world has totally changed and their mindset has not changed yet,” said investor Jim Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings, adding that he hasn’t invested in Taiwan “in a while.”
“Other Asian countries like Singapore haveopened up so much more,” he said. “Taiwan, because of its history, while it’s changing dramatically, unbelievably has still not opened its economy fast.”
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