Sometimes you really do have to ask yourself whether President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is actually living in cloud cuckoo land.
Fresh from the fiasco of nominating a controversial “dinosaur” judge to the Council of Grand Justices, Ma got it wrong again in a comment he made about the economy. On Saturday he said that last year’s economic growth rate was the best the Taiwanese economy has seen in 63 years. What on earth is he talking about? This goes against the facts of Taiwan’s economic development. Ma was here during Taiwan’s most prosperous era, so how can he not recall those heady days?
Let’s look at the figures. Last year the economy grew at a rate of 10.82 percent. That’s a pretty healthy rate, but nothing out of the ordinary compared with the kinds of rates we were seeing from the 1960s to the 1980s, when figures exceeding 10 percent were relatively common. Specifically, in 1964, 1965 and 1967 the economic growth rate in Taiwan was 11.57, 10.85 and 10.41 percent, respectively.
The 1970s saw even higher rates. In 1970 the rate was 10.60 percent. The following year it jumped to 12.45 percent, which, though impressive, was trumped by 13.15 percent in 1972. It was slightly lower in 1973, at 11.83 percent, but then was back up again in 1976, reaching 13.45 percent. The highest figure was that of 1978, when the rate climbed to 13.49 percent.
Not wanting to labor the point, the 1980s saw growth rates of 11.00, 10.68 and 10.38 percent in 1986, 1987 and 1989 respectively.
Looking at these figures, one notices that the rate exceeded 11 percent on seven occasions. How, then, can Ma claim that last year’s rate represented the highest economic growth rate in 63 years?
The reason why last year’s rate was so high was simply because the base rate to which it was compared was so low. In 2008 and 2009, at the very beginning of Ma’s presidency, the growth rate was 0.73 percent and minus-1.93 percent respectively. For two years running, then, Taiwan experienced its lowest and third-lowest rates in half a century. Last year’s figure represents a rebound from a virtually unprecedented low, so it can hardly be regarded as a peak in itself, and there is certainly no reason to take any pride in it. This is not even up to the standards seen when former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) was in power. In 2001, the economy contracted by 1.65 percent, but in the following year it was growing at 5.26 percent.
That the Ma administration sees fit to harp on about something that one has no business being proud of simply demonstrates the diffidence of this government.
To add insult to injury, this 10.82 percent growth rate has made no actual improvement to the life of ordinary people in this country.
According to a recent online survey by two Web-based human resource companies on salaried workers’ attitudes about the price of everyday goods and services in Taiwan, 94 percent of respondents said they were concerned about rising prices. Many companies say they will adjust salaries upward, but according to the survey, 72 percent of respondents claim that their salaries have not gone up. The remaining 28 percent are the lucky ones, although in more than 90 percent of these cases the salary rise is less than 2 percent. With the rate of inflation taken into account, even these raises represent a reduction in salaries in real terms.
While the Ma administration is busy declaring grandiose-sounding economic figures, the reality is that the fat cats are getting fatter, while the ordinary person is suffering.
Lin Cho-shui is a former Democratic Progressive Party legislator.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
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