The State of Studying the Taiwanese Economy: Retrospect and Prospect

Abstract

The study of Taiwan’s economy began to flourish in the 1960s right up until in the late 1980s. Most early publications discussed the larger issues or macro aspects of economic development during this time. After the 1990s, most publications on Taiwan’s economy covered other applied fields in micro aspects of the economy. The shift of research focus is probably due to: decelerated economic growth; the rising of new research topics due to socioeconomic and political developments such as environmental, labour and health economics; the availability of statistical data; and the advancement of applied econometrics for empirical studies. This article contends that future study of the Taiwanese economy will be more fruitful if the country is compared with other countries at a similar stage of development—in other words, if it is looked at from a comparative perspective.