One of the Macro-views for the Future Development of Taiwan

I had a chat with my friend Tai last week, he works for the Taiwan governemnt for many years, and so he is concerned the future development of Taiwan seriously.

As his statement, there are structual problems happen in Taiwan, First the promotion of the level of eduction to the overall citizens cause the people in Taiwan gradually pay attention to enjoy their personal leisure time, not like their parents, the life of their parents could be simply described by the turns of working and breeding, the parents worked for their childern, not for themselves. They prefer to be DINK (Double Incomes No Kids) than to bring up children. Therefore, the aging of population will cause the minority population to bear the expense of social welfare of the majority population. In other words, the young generation should make more money to afford to the taxation increasement, if we want to keep the same level of social welfare.

Secondly, the people with higher income and erudite won't have any child, but the lower keep on spawning their children, even they can't afford to breed the children up. Not to mention the employment of foreign laborers from Eastern South Asia Countries, e.g. Thailand, Philippine, and the open policy to import brides from Vietnam and China for the disadvantaged minority, they both produced the disastrous consequences at the cultural adaption and the amounts of babies of mixed blood. It's hard to believe that the children will grow up to be the right man to hold the development of Taiwan's future, if the children lack of attention and nurturing.

If we put the education policy, the development of industries, and the aging of population together to think about, there are connections among them. If we want to tranform the industries to play a key role in the value chain of crossnational cooperation networks, such as from assembly line production to the research and design parts/components of product, or establish private brand for international sales, the supply of well-educated people from academies will be the important factor for the transition. If we can't provide the amount of person who are good at the development of product or who are familiar with the international marketing skills, the industries will hardly survive in the gloabl game of cost competition, the migration to the developing counties and the third world will be the only choice to do for the business, the employment of foreign laborers for the manufacturing firms in Taiwan could lower the production cost temporarily, but it cound not solve the cost competition problem permanently.

The aging of population will cause the shortage of labor supply, if the demand of labor remains at th same level as before. It also results in the import of foreign laborers, even the industrial migration. How can we break through the crisis face to us?

Here is my suggestions for the government policy:
1. Encourage the intelligentsia to procreate babies, the intelligentsia will be able to provide a abundant environment to cultivate their children to satisfy the demand of quality for the future development of Taiwan.
2. Improve the design of academic courses to fit the need of industrial development, train for the movement of position in industrial value chain activities.
3. Utilize the knowledges and industrial know-how embeded in the aging people, provide the consulting job to the retired people will creat valuable productivity.