Labor participation gap
Currently, Taiwan’s unemployment hovers at about 4 percent. That is amazingly low from a European perspective. However, the figure stands in somewhat strange contrast to the nation’s labor-force participation rate.
The latter statistic is rarely quoted: People tend to look at this figure only when there is something misleading about the unemployment number.
France’s participation rate was just 56 percent in 2012. This means, in effect, that the social consequences of unemployment in France are much worse than people might assume from the unemployment statistics alone.
As is common throughout Europe today, many people are not working who do not count as “unemployed” — including students over the age of 15 and retirees, but also people who are jobless for various reasons who are not counted as unemployed in its technical definition.
Meanwhile, in Asia, there are some contrasting examples of very high participation rates: Thailand was at 72 percent, Lao at 78 percent and Cambodia 83 percent in 2012.
Those are countries where, really, anyone who is able-bodied can find work, even amid widespread poverty and political instability.
However, Taiwan, with its 4 percent unemployment rate, had a 58.52 percent labor-force participation rate as of January, scarcely better than France.
Although the nation has large numbers of retirees and university students, these categories cannot entirely explain the gap between the 4 percent unemployment rate and the under-59 percent participation rate.
Evidently, many people here are jobless, but are not counted as unemployed.
Eisel Mazard
Taitung
Marine merger misguided
The government’s announcement that it would merge the marine corps into the army has sparked enormous debate and controversy online and on TV news, as well as in current affairs shows. The issue has drawn much attention and been extensively discussed by experts, veterans and TV hosts.
While neighboring countries are reinforcing and increasing the budget for their marine forces, what is our government doing?
The marines are not asking for any privileges: We are only asking for an equal opportunity to contribute and devote ourselves to the defense and security of our nation.
We are “loyal forever” (Semper Fidelis) to our country, but how hardhearted is our mother country that it even thinks of abandoning us?
To the majority of marine veterans, the merger with the army is equal to the dissolution of the marines. Why? Some specialties of the marine corps cannot simply be replaced or substituted by the army.
It is not that the total combat capacities of the marines are superior to the army’s, but the missions we carry out, as well as our way of training, are almost completely different from each other. Amphibious tanks, like the AAVP-7, have no counterpart or even similar sector in the army. Veteran marines cannot help but keep wondering what will happen to these precious and costly national assets.
In particular, the heritage and morale of marine traditions are invisible weapons. They just cannot be replaced or substituted by anything or anyone else.
As a marine veteran, I sincerely request our government to reconsider and reassess the decision to merge the marine corps with the army.
Mark Tsai
Ashfield, Australia
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS