AmCham about the emergency to review Taiwan’s foreign investment policy
Taiwan needs comprehensive reforms to boost its future
“Taiwan is underperforming as a destination for foreign investment, lagging behind traditional and emerging competitors in the region chiefly due to difficult access”, the AmCham Taipei stated earlier this month when releasing its white paper for Taiwan.
The American Chamber of Commerce urged Taiwan to speed up economic reform and liberalization to catch up with its Asian competitors, namely Korea and increasingly China. The organization, lobbying for greater exchange between the island and the rest of the world, designs 4 main areas of reform:
– Investment attractiveness
– Regulatory Climate
– Free trade agreements
– Infrastructure
Invest in Taiwan, the need to reform current regulations
As we stated at the very beginning of the launch of our consulting company, Taiwan Business Consulting, Taiwan must foster its investment attractiveness. Today the AmCham leads the path, saying that Taiwan is “significantly underperforming as a destination for foreign investment.”
AmCham provides some leads the governments could follow in order to fix that increasing gap in foreign investment between Taiwan and its competitors:
– Thoroughly reevaluate the foreign investment application approval process
– Publish clear and comprehensive criteria for assessing investment proposals, with specific timetables for regulatory decisions
– Change the working Immigration regulations for skilled workforce: the inflow of foreign talent remains too restrictive. Delays and difficulties in bringing employees of affiliated enterprises in China to Taiwan are especially troublesome, and rules such as requiring foreign job applicants to have two years of related work experience should be dropped.
AmCham highlights several other reforms in various fields, such as the Intellectual Property Rights regime and its need to enact patent linkage and data exclusivity rules to better protect the R&D efforts, the need to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership to counterbalance US’ trade with China, and finally raised concern on the ability of Taiwanese system to provide high paid jobs for graduate students, therefore willing to emigrate to China or US to find higher paid jobs.
As ITRI’s Steve Chi told us a few weaks ago:” We don’t have any excuse not too succeed.” Now it seems like reforms are urging. Money Time.
Download the full white paper here