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Friday, November 23, 2007

Homelessness in Taiwan

Reuters offers yet another dismal report on the state of Taiwan's economy....

Lack of family or close friends, or shame in confronting them in a society that puts a premium on getting ahead materially, pushes some jobless people outdoors.

"They think if that if they haven't succeeded they can't go home, and some don't want to be a burden on anyone," said Liu Chi-chen, a publicity worker with the Homeless Welfare Foundation. "Today's society is very complex."

Taiwan's unemployment rate has hovered at 4 percent over the past two years, but salaries are stagnating or falling, with the best jobs elusive, as prices of food, rent and transportation go up. Cheap labor from Southeast Asia is standard at construction sites and factories in Taiwan.

Government statistics show that 3,655 homeless people were assisted last year compared to 2,260 five years ago. Many more go it alone or look to charities, aid workers say.

Within the past five years, the number of boxed lunches given away by the charity Homeless Welfare Foundation has soared from just over 9,000 per month to over 29,000 last month.

"In the past few years, the number of homeless people has gone up a lot as the unemployed population gets bigger," said Lu Fang-tsuang who handles Buddhist charity Tzu Chi's homeless relief work in northern Taiwan.

Reuters here makes a signficant deviation from facts reported elsewhere:

Employers have forecast their slowest hiring in three years because of rising global raw material prices and uncertainty over the outcome of Taiwan's 2008 presidential election.

Is hiring slowing? Um....nope. Hiring is on the upswing, as Bloomberg reported:

Manufacturers, led by AU Optronics Corp. and Hewlett- Packard Co., and banks including Standard Chartered Plc are expanding and hiring more workers, boosting household incomes and stoking consumer spending. Faster economic growth provides room for the central bank to raise interest rates next month.

``The cyclical recovery in consumer spending has helped cushion slowing external demand and is the key to our rather upbeat growth assessment for Taiwan this year,'' said Tony Phoo, an economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Taipei.

In addition to Bloomberg, the pro-KMT China Post -- it is a plank in the KMT platform that the economy sucks and only the KMT can save it -- also reported Taiwan's excellent job numbers, citing the DGBAS:

Taiwan's jobless rate remained unchanged at close to the lowest this year in October as companies hired workers amid signs the economy's expansion is gathering pace.

The rate stayed at 3.89 percent last month from September, seasonally adjusted, the statistics bureau said in Taipei yesterday. That matched the median estimate of 13 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.


The Taipei Times has an in-depth look at the strong positive numbers -- projected at 5.46% this year, up from 4.5% predicted earlier this year, driven by booming export growth.

The always excellent Taiwan Review shows that the growing homeless problem is actually an ongoing issue with deep roots going back to the economic changes in the 1990s. Here's what they wrote six years ago, in 2001:

Some factors are unique to the individual, but there are also historical, political, and socioeconomic factors at work," Yang says. According to him, over 90 percent of his charges are men in the forty-to-sixty age group with not much education. Apart from the mentally and physically sick, and victims of domestic violence, there are also some veterans who came to Taiwan in 1949 with the KMT government. Some have no relatives in Taiwan to turn to for support. Others are deserters and therefore have no papers. The consequence is that they may not apply for a veteran's pension or receive care at the various veterans' homes run by the government islandwide.

In recent years, Yang has noticed that a growing number of people with marketable working skills are losing their homes through some traumatic change in circumstances, often the result of an economic downturn. After it became legal to hire laborers from abroad in 1990, most traditional manufacturers assembled work forces drawn from the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, paying them less than Taiwanese would demand. This naturally threw many local people out of work. "The fact that a lot of manufacturers are now going bust or moving to mainland China or Asian countries in search of cheaper overheads only adds frost to the snow," Yang says.

Over the past two years, social workers have also started to find white-collar workers living on the street. Usually they are well educated, and they held managerial or better positions in the company that formerly employed them. "You'll even find people who used to run their own businesses," Chen Ting-hsun says. "They're often difficult to recognize as homeless, because they may still be wearing suits and ties."

Both Yang and Chen predict an increase in the number of homeless people who are victims of drastic social and economic change, as Taiwan develops into a mature industrialized country. Pressures, particularly financial ones, are sapping the system of family ties that used to support people in times of adversity. At present, there are only a handful of sad stories about aged, frail parents being dumped on the street or rummaging through the garbage in search of food, but their number will increase, and with each increase the tale will become a little less shocking, a little less of a spur to make people stop and think about where things are going.

"Times have changed," Chen observes dryly. "Nowadays it's hard enough to support your own immediate family, even with two paychecks, let alone having to take care of your parents. Some old people deliberately chose to become homeless. They know that the law obliges children to take care of their parents, and they don't want to be a burden."

The whole article gives an excellent overview of the history of homeless policy in recent years, and an in-depth look at the homelessness problem. Well worth a read.

4 comments:

  1. I wonder if you can still see those strange scribblings anymore. They appear on walls, under bridge, on transformer boxes. I saw it in Taichung, Taipei, Kaoshiung, and even Wufeng, before I left Taiwan. The scribblings tend to be phrased alike, including phrases such as "Shout! America! Money borrowing country!" (叫!美国!借钱国![yes, simplified]) Coincident? I think not. Cabalist writing? The work of one mad person? Your call.

    Remember, there's no conspiracy.

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  2. How does Taiwan measure jobless rate? I know US use unempolyment benefit rolls, but there is another measurement using actual payroll tax counts. For US, 3rd quarter of this year the unempolyment rate decrease slightly but payroll tax counts dropped significantly. If you look at data carefully, you will realize that unempolyment rate decresed mainly due to one factor that large amounts of people are no longer qualified for the benefit and are dropped from the data.

    Btw, is there a minimum wage law in Taiwan? I am just curious.

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  3. Yes, the US figures are ridiculous. They also introduced something called the Birth-Death model that creates fudge factors under which they can lower the unemployment rate still further. I saw an analysis on Dailykos that suggests that the US is in a massive recession...

    Yes, there is a minimum wage law, just under 19K a month. I think it is $85 an hour, but I am not sure.

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  4. Not to belittle the statistics of Taiwan's homeless problems, but as many Taiwanese love their USA, I thought I'd compare the nummbers.

    In San Francisco, where homelessness and peeing on the streets is a lifestyle, there are currently an estimated 6,248 homeless.

    That's about .9% of the city's population.

    (These would be "hardcore" homeless, and not the hundreds of below-the-poverty-line panhandlers, mentally ill, dope addicts and deadheads who may have homes/shelter, but choose to hang out on the streets).

    Using the round figure of 4000 to estimate "hardcore" homeless in Taiwan, that would be equal to
    .018% of the population of 23,000,000, if I crunched my numbers correctly.

    Now back to the US homeless population:

    The average age of a homeless person living in the US is nine years-old.

    3.5 million people (1.35 million of which are children) will experience homelessness in a given year. (US population +/- 303,000,000; so sround 1% of the population could be homeless)

    Children under the age of 18 account for 39% of the homeless population. 42% of these are under the age of 5.

    43% of the homeless population are women; 40% of these women are unaccompanied. 22% of homeless women claim domestic abuse as reason for homelessness. 25% of these claim to have been abused within the past year.

    Families with children comprise 33%of the homeless population.

    Vets constitute 40% of the homeless population.

    1 in every 5 homeless persons has a severe or persistent mental illness.

    25% of the homeless nationwide are employed.

    ReplyDelete

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