40% of last year’s White Paper issues rated as resolved or making good progress. Special to Topics Online AmCham Taipei’s 2018 Taiwan White Paper, released June 6 with a news conference followed by a membership luncheon at the Regent Taipei, highlighted the unprecedented progress achieved over the past year in resolving issues raised by the…
AmCham Taipei reported today that 11 of the 83 issues in its 2017 Taiwan White Paper have been resolved – the most of any year since the organization started tracking the results in 2004. Another record 21 issues were showing good progress. “The major turnaround in 2017 was largely due to unprecedented cooperation with the…
Each year when AmCham Taipei prepares a new edition of its Taiwan White Paper, it asks its various industry committees to report back on the degree of progress toward resolution of their White Paper issues from the year before. As part of the review, each issue gets rated according to a five-tier scale. The top…
March was a good month for Taiwan-U.S. relations. In what may be a new record, three key U.S. officials made separate visits to Taiwan during the month: Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific Alex Wong, U.S. Ambassador to APEC Matt Matthews, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Manufacturing Ian…
We noticed something different in the recently completed 2018 AmCham Taipei Business Climate Survey, summarized in this issue of TOPICS. There’s a sense that progress is beginning to be made in many problem areas. To be sure, the survey respondents had plenty of concerns. These include the treatment of professional and managerial personnel under current…
During her visit to Taipei at the end of January, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce Diane Farrell lauded the decision by the Taiwan government to establish a Patent Linkage system to help ensure that generic drugs cannot reach the market while the original product is still covered by a valid Taiwan patent. Farrell described…
The American withdrawal from the nascent Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade block almost immediately after President Trump assumed office early this year left Taiwan without a concrete, compelling objective to work toward in its economic relationship with the United States. Until then, Taiwan had a clear focus – its hope that it would be able to…
The Executive Yuan has made known its intention to re-revise the Labor Standards Law after amendments passed last year left both employers and employees dissatisfied with the rigidities it imposed on working hours, overtime pay, and other working conditions. A new draft is expected to be submitted to the Legislative Yuan in November. AmCham Taipei…
Each year in recent years, the “Messages to Washington” section of AmCham Taipei’s annual Taiwan White Paper has strongly argued in favor of more frequent high-level visits to Taiwan by U.S. government officials. As stated in the 2017 White Paper, “it has been the Chamber’s experience that periodic visits by high-level officials can make a…
Each spring when The American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei (AmCham Taipei) publishes the latest edition of its Taiwan White Paper, it reviews the issues raised by its various committees in the previous year’s edition. The committees assign each issue a number representing the degree of progress over the past year. A (1) is the…
