Traditional industries in New Taipei City innovates to enhance their service
Economic Development Department of New Taipei City gave out a special report: “Innovation of New Taipei City’s traditional industries” during New Taipei City Municipal Conference on 1/28/2014. After listening to the report, Mayor Eric Chu indicated that there were about 250,000 medium and small enterprises as well as 21,000 factories in New Taipei City. They were the important engine for boosting Taiwan’s economic development, and the two numbers were the greatest nationwide. He thought all the governments should re-evaluate the assignments of the education, human and money resources; also, they should properly put more focus on traditional industries and livelihood service industries to achieve the goal of “innovation of traditional industries and elevation of services.”
Economic Development Department Commissioner Ye Huiqing pointed out in the report that the city’s total employed population was 1892,000, and the employed population in traditional industries and livelihood service industries together was up to 1010,000 people accounting for 53.41% of the total employed population. The superior industries such as IT, cloud related, biotech and green industries accounted for 28.65% whereas construction industries accounted for 9.76%; others accounted for 8.18%. Traditional industries and livelihood service industries all shared the same problems of inadequate marketing ability and lack of management and technical talents. To solve these problems, Economic Development Department started to promote innovative strategies on environment, media and each individual industry, including the establishment of Industrial Innovation Center and the promotion of innovation on energy-saving of livelihood service industries, on products, on places as well as on services and marketing.
Mayor Chu represented that during the past 10 years, Taiwan switched its focus on traditional industries to high-tech industries; however, the Central Government’s industrial development policies had some flaws. He took an example of the policy of “two trillion and two industrial stars” proposed by the Central Government ten years ago, and he pointed out that the Central Government excessively put resources on high-tech industries whereas ignoring traditional industries which also had great profits. Thus the problems of education resources misplacement and unbalanced salary structure were resulted afterwards.
The Mayor said that many schools used Higher Education resources to foster high-tech talents, but most of children should enter into traditional industries or livelihood service industries. Schools needed to offer training and opportunities to children. For example, Juang Jing Vocational High School had fostered many catering talents in Taiwan; however, their salaries were not very high. This tendency also caused the distortion of job markets. The Mayor continued and said that the spending of NT$1500,000 could help traditional industries create one job opportunity whereas high-tech industries had to cost NT$150,000,000 instead. That number compared to traditional industries’ was nearly a hundred times. Consequently, Taiwan had a high unemployment rate, but lacking of talents.
Due to the above points, Mayor Chu indicated that the City Government considerably focused on vocational education of traditional industries and livelihood service industries. For example, there were public vocational schools such as New Taipei Industrial Vocational High School, New Taipei Municipal San-Chung Commercial and Industrial Vocational High School and New Taipei Municipal Jui-Fang Industrial High School. For private schools, there were Fu-Hsin Trade & Arts School and Juang Jing Vocational High School. All these schools had excellent achievements on talent training of machinery, casting, graphic design and catering management. If traditional industries could innovate to elevate services, then New Taipei City’s domestic salon, hospitality and catering management talents could leap onto the international stage.
For food safety issues, the Mayor indicated that the City Government cooperated with Council of Agriculture Executive Yuan to promote “4+1 safe vegetables project. He hoped that by setting Education as a starting point, Taiwanese agricultural products could all become non-toxic and organic in the future. Although currently Taiwanese agricultural products were not fully organic yet, letting everyone eat safe and reliable vegetables every day was the goal of the City Government. He directed the Agriculture Department to ensure to coordinate with farmers, and carefully made arrangements with those cities of vegetables origins to ensure balanced and stable supply.
Moreover, Eric Chu indicated that the Food Safety Cloud had been set up, and civilians could use it to look up where the ingredients of their lunch meal came from. He hoped in the future the system could be expanded to have an inquiry function for both unpacked and packed ingredients, so civilians could always check and inspectors could readily make comparisons.