Taoyuan Nights

Take a look at this report in the Taipei Times today.

To summarise:

• Basic unemployment has risen to the highest level ever recorded in Taiwan: 5.6%.
  
• If you factor in the ‘fake jobs’ recently added to hide unemployment, the level is 6.1%.
  
• If you factor in the people who’ve simply given up looking for a job, the level is 7.3%.
  
• If you factor in the high student intake of recent years, I suspect you’d get closer to 9%.
  
• If you factor in that governments are notorious for producing lagging data, I suspect you’d get closer to 9.5%.
  
• If you factor in that governments are notorious for producing ‘nice-looking’ data, i.e. Taiwan’s claims of no drop in GDP this year for example, you probably get somewhere way north of 10%.
  
• What else could I factor in… the pointless 15 months of ‘military service’? 11%+?
  

Meanwhile, wages dropped another 0.8% this month. Or to put it another way, if we were to annualise the current rate of drop in wages, we’d see that wages are dropping at an annualised rate of 10% per year. Given that in some industries, Taiwan is already competing with China and India for paying low wages, this is quite remarkable.

With doubled spending but a halved tax take, income tax is likely to rocket. But people’s wages are lower. Still feeling glad you spent your ’stimulus’ voter-bribe back in February? And was it a good idea to buy houses at record high prices, in the hope of a quick and easy profit?

Asian Tiger? Asian Tigger more like.