At today's Cabinet meeting, Premier Mao Chi-kuo and the National Development Council (NDC) described numerous policies to address the projected decline in Taiwan's working-age population.
The nation's working-age population will decrease by an average of 180,000 annually after this year, Mao pointed out. Since it will be too late to come up with response measures once this decline is underway, the government has been constantly reminding the public to face this issue in order to establish a basic consensus for further discussions, he said.
The government has launched a comprehensive review of the challenges population structure changes pose in areas such as economic development and youth employment, and it has also deliberated how ministries are to respond.
These major demographic changes will influence overall policy, Mao stressed. For instance, appropriate adjustments can be made to:
- Academia-industry collaboration, employment guidance and educational issues, which are part of youth employment policy.
- Raising the labor force participation rate and establishing a family-friendly environment as well as a social support system, which are part of women's policy.
- Effective use of the senior-citizen workforce and the cooperation of young and elderly workers, which are part of aging society policy.
In order to rectify the situations of youths entering the job market late in their lives and middle-aged and elderly workers retiring early, the NDC will promote the policies of enhancing the labor participation of middle-aged and elderly people and improving diverse employment channels for youths. Moreover, in order to encourage more women to join the labor market, plans are being drawn up to universalize child care services and offer comprehensive caretaking resources.
In the face of these demographic changes, in addition to increasing the domestic labor force participation rate Taiwan has to recruit overseas talents in an extensive manner, Mao pointed out. Therefore, the country must deal with immigration issues seriously. Drawing up policies attracting foreign students to stay and work in Taiwan is a moderate measure that can be adopted immediately, Mao said.
However, the actual labor shortage is much larger than the number of those foreign students deciding to stay and work in Taiwan. Mao indicated that Taiwan should thus start to seriously discuss ways to attract immigrants, including both regular immigrants and supplemental laborers which would be granted only work permits, not citizenship.
To recruit talents, the NDC will formulate an overseas recruiting network and job-matching platform to remedy past measures where each agency hunted for its own needed talent. Meanwhile, the NDC will work to adjust existing salary schemes and expenditures for technology development programs to provide a more internationally competitive salary structure.
To attract international youths, the NDC is formulating a startup visa program to expedite the process for global talents or teams to come to Taiwan for innovation and startups.
To supplement the nation's mid-level skilled technical work force, the NDC will speed up the policy assessment and formulate a points-based assessment scheme for foreign candidates.
If the labor force still falls short after implementing the aforementioned measures to raise the supply of workers, then examination and evaluation will focus on the industrial "demand end," Premier Mao pointed out. Labor-intensive industries would need to transform and upgrade while the manufacturing sector would be required to quickly automate in order to reduce manpower demand and thus maintain a balance in the labor market.