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Since the beginning of the 21 century, there have been two major trends in Taiwan’s economic growth, population aging and globalization. The speed, scale and impacts of those two factors were so tremendous that we had never encountered before. The contemporary problems, such as industries going out, wage stagnation, unemployment uprising, income distribution worsening and pension crisis are all related to them.
Taiwan used to be an agricultural society, now becomes a major player in the industry of information technology (IT). Though IT industry creates a lot of employment opportunities, they almost always occur in less-developed and lower-cost countries. Even if some of the opportunities do stay in Taiwan, firms generally hire foreign workers instead, thus the growth of the IT industry has little contribution to the domestic labor demand. Besides, along with the economic growth, developed countries often establishing social insurance schemes to provide social protection for their people. Nevertheless, at the end of the 20 century, population aging and economic stagnation have resulted in the financial crisis of the social insurance system, Taiwan is no exception.
When a country’s elderly rely more on social protection, it bound to face the striving balance between insurance and public finance. And the continuous population aging will inevitably increase the burden of both. From the experience of Japan, the unstable social protection will have negative impact on both the birth rate and the willingness to work, as well as on the investment and industrial growth.
This project gathers the experts of demography, labor economics, industrial economics, public finance, and social welfare in order to study issues related to population structure, labor policy, industrial transformation and sustainable pension. The final product will be an integrated multi-dimensional prospective research report with proposals for government policy reform so as to warrant a sustainable growth.