Taipei, Oct. 20 (CNA) "Taiwan is ready, the world is welcome to invest in us, " President Chen Shui-bian said at the opening of the 2003 Taiwan Business Alliance Conference in Taipei on Monday.
Speaking to more than 1,900 global business leaders, Chen said Taiwan's economy has already made the transition from an agricultural country to a logistics hub for the information industry. Glancing through the history of Taiwan's economic development, Chen said that in the 16th century, the Spaniards, the Dutch and others coming from Europe began to use Taiwan as a maritime center for ship docking, transactions, and transshipments.
At that time, thanks to its superior geographic location, Taiwan was already performing the role of an East Asian transshipment center. Today, the island of Taiwan, thanks to the hard work and unrelenting efforts of its people, has accumulated abundant foreign reserves and high-quality R&D capabilities, as well as ample high-tech manufacturing capabilities, he said.. "It is for these reasons that Taiwan, amid fierce international competition, has already established the prerequisites for outperforming its competitors and has won the recognition and affirmation of international public opinion," the president said.
He cited reports by several influential international economic research institutes to showcase Taiwan's investment environment and competitiveness.
Firstly, he said that the Lausanne-based International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in its World Competitiveness Yearbook 2003, ranked Taiwan sixth among economies larger than 20 million people.
The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in Great Britain has upgraded its evaluation of Taiwan's business environment for the next five years from "good" to "very good." In the EIU's latest business environment ranking, Taiwan ranked 18th worldwide and third in Asia, he said.
In the investment climate rating by Swiss-based Business Environment Risk Intelligence (BERI) , Taiwan tied for fourth place with Japan. At the same time BERI forecasts that Taiwan will overtake Japan in 2008.
Taiwan showed an even more outstanding performance in a global e-government ranking by Brown University of the United States, taking the top spot for the second year in a row, the president said. "All this only shows that the government's efforts in recent years to improve the investment climate have begun to pay off, " Chen said.
The president also said that to bring a global wave of corporate investments to Taiwan, the government adopted the "Taiwan First Investment Incentive Program" in November of last year, which calls for using preferential land rent schemes for industrial districts and state land to lower land use costs.
Moreover, the government has been working actively to attract international capital and to encourage multinational corporations to establish R&D centers and operations headquarters in Taiwan by providing investment tax credits and payroll and rent subsidies for foreign-owned R&D centers, and incentives such as exemption from the for-profit enterprise income tax for multinationals.
He said that in July this year, the government scrapped the US$3 billion ceiling on investments in the local stock market by qualified foreign institutional investors (QFII) and also opened participation in the domestic Securities Borrowing and Lending Market. Subsequently, the Legislative Yuan passed a number of important financial bills to help with the liberalization of the local financial and monetary markets. "All of these measures will contribute to the liberalization of Taiwan's investment climate, while perfecting the basic infrastructure to make our financial system more robust, " the president said.
With regard to Taiwan's relations with mainland China, Chen said he has been sincere calling for an improvement in cross-strait ties.
Saying that he proposed in August a three-stage plan for direct transportation links, Chen said that after next year's presidential election, negotiations on direct links should be launched smoothly, based on a process of equality, mutual respect and cooperation, and that before the end of next year, measures leading to the establishment of direct links should be progressively realized and negotiations on direct cross-strait links completed.
Furthermore, Chen said that in early September the government officially announced the "facilitation of air cargo, " which would allow Taiwan's carriers to fly to Shanghai with " scheduled charter flights" using current routes that stop over in Hong Kong or Macao. The concept is currently still waiting for a positive response from mainland China.
As to his call for an unprecedented national referendum next year, Chen said it is a measure aimed to cement the country's democracy rather than provoking the long-standing dispute of whether the country should seek permanent separation from mainland China, and will not contradict the promise he made in his 2000 inaugural speech of not seeking independence. "Peace across the Taiwan Strait depends on the wisdom and efforts of people on both sides of it, " he said, adding that worldwide investors should have confidence in Taiwan, its democracy, and in its determination to push through with reforms.
Saying that both the Taiwan government and its people have long been well-prepared to welcome companies from around the globe to operate in Taiwan, the president called on the international business community to seize the chance to invest in Taiwan.