A Brief View of Taiwan Development Construction

    Government makes decisions to make development constructions through its legislative procedures to meet people's needs. Very often, those development decisions that government makes need to go through many administrative steps to accomplish. For example, in Taiwan, the decision to build a public park in a cit government owned estate has to make by members of city government. They vote for such kind of development proposal then the mayor will sign it and invite bids for the construction.

    However, sometimes decision making is much more complicated than that. For national development construction, like high speed railroad, the proposal was made by executive officers and the prime minister decided to run this program in 1990. An important government department called "Council For Economic Planning and Development" played a significant role at that time. The council is composed  by many development ministers of each development, including minister without portfolio, minister of finance, minister of economic affairs, and minister of transportations and communications. The council is responsible for formulating, evaluating, and coordinating national economic development policies and measures. As a result, it provided proposal regarding environmental, domestic economic climate, and supply and demand issues while constructing high speed railroad.

    In addition, the government used the mode "BOT" (Build, Operate, and Transfer) to let private firms and financial institutions to collect money and to arrange resources. In fact, there are few successful BOT cases in Taiwan base on its economic growth. Sometimes the government only wants to imitate the success done by other countries and makes wrong decisions. In Taiwan, too many politicians just want to fatten their purses, rather than to consider public benefits. Many development constructions. which could be well operated, were suspended due to negative bureaucrat procedures, but that will be another story.