Taiwan’s homeland development to undergo big change
Taipei, June 29 (CNA) The focus of Taiwan’s homeland development will be adjusted after a number of the country’s regional governments were formally upgraded to municipalities Monday, with more balanced growth the main objective.
Jiang Yi-huah, minister of the Research, Development and Evaluation Commission, said the government’s local development plan will now concentrate on the “three major living circles” and seven integrated areas.
President Ma Ying-jeou originally proposed to streamline Taiwan’s 25 counties and cities, including the two special municipalities of Taipei and Kaohsiung, into three metropolitan areas and 15 counties, with a metropolitan area located in each of Taiwan’s northern, central and southern regions to encourage more balanced development.
Those plans will be modified after the Cabinet on Monday approved the mergers of Taichung City and County, Kaohsiung City and County and Tainan City and County, and the upgrading of Taipei County’s status.
The government now intends to pursue balanced development in seven regions, Jiang said, grouped as follows: the Taipei, Keelung and Yilan area; the Taoyuan, Hsinchu and Miaoli area; the Taichung, Changhua and Nantou area; the Yunlin, Chiayi and Tainan area; the Kaohsung and Pingtung area; the Hualien and Taitung area; and the Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu area.
In the future, Jiang said, efforts will be made to highlight different advantages of the seven planned integrated areas, such as the highly competitive agricultural sector in the Yunlin, Chiayi and Nantou area, or the high-tech cluster and well-preserved Hakka culture in the Taoyuan, Hsinchu and Miaoli area.
With this commitment to more balanced regional growth, the Cabinet hopes the long-existing inequity in the distribution of funds from the central to local governments will be resolved.
At present, the two special municipalities receive 43 percent of the allocation for local governments, while the other 23 cities and counties share the rest.
But Minister of Finance Lee Sush-der said Monday that his agency has drafted a legal revision that, if passed, would allocate funds to all local governments based on the more equitable measures of population and administrative scale.
(By Elizabeth Hsu)
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