This dissertation is a sociological study in contemporary Taiwan as seen from a socioeconomic perspective, selecting 15 key economic indicators that represent the island’s structures of everyday life for the period 1980 to 1998.
Chapter 1 identifies Taiwan’s five stages of economic-structural transformation by way of the per capita annual growth rates for Gross National Product and National Income. Chapter 2 adopts a diachronic expressive mode in the periodization and structural comparison of total population, production, income, and consumption, finding that an accelerating M1B annual growth rate can no longer push higher the Gross Domestic Product growth rate. For example, the average M1B growth rate in the 1980-89 period was 21.03% ¾ expanding a post-war record high of 51.42% in 1986 ¾ and the monetarization (M1B) of per capita consumption even exceeded 100% in 1987-88, but the average GDP growth rate was 8.15% in 1980-89 and only 6.21% in 1990-98. “Total monetary penetration through society” is a consequence of the KMT’s authoritative operations as well as the synchronic selection of global-local (termed “glocal”) economic systems. And as the government suffers diminishing total tax revenues, the proportion of income tax to total tax revenues grows year by year. In order to address the problem of lower annual rate of tax revenues(T↓), the govern-ment has had to issue huge amounts of public bonds ¾ outstanding public bonds totaled NT$ 1.25 trillion at the end of December 1999 while real 1999 GDP was valued at NT$ 9.05 trillion ¾ thus giving rise to a “public bonds directed state”(d↑). This tendency toward “manifest tax and latent debt” together with lower average monthly earnings growth (4.09% real growth in 1990-98) produces a complex impact on glocal economic systems.
Chapter 3 adopts a synchronic expressive mode to explicate the meaning of exports, imports, current account, approved foreign investment and approved outward invest-ment. At the same time, a close examination of the volatility of average monthly earnings per capita, average monthly income per household, rate of surplus value and (residential and commercial) land prices, confirms Taipei municipality’s ascendancy over all other cities and prefectures, and indicates that social-economic development in the north of Taiwan from Taipei to Hsinchu is superior to that of the south from Taichung and Kaohsiung. Production and consumption are the two elementary con-cepts used to articulate the inner and outer changing conditions of Taiwan, and the average industry wage is deemed an intermediate concept or interface in the resultant explanation. That is, when the rate of surplus value, rate of profit and land price are rising in the long-term but interest rates and rate of profit / assets are moving in the opposite direction, then the average real wage growth rate (i.e. minus inflation) is effectively suppressed (g↓) by capitalists who enjoy huge profits, while simultane-ously exposing improper operations about assets especially in the domestic financial sectors, which constitutes a big strike to Taiwan’s whole industrial transformation.
Chapter 4 concentrates on the 1990s, in particular the lower annual growth of average earnings, the rise in outstanding public bonds and the instability of tax revenues at all levels of government, and the stagnation of the export / GDP ratio and rise in the import / GDP ratio ─ in other words, an aging economy trapped by quick sand (i.e. unstable foundation) of globalization (GDP↓T↓g↓d↑WE↑x↓m↑), which signals wholly new crises facing all sectors in Taiwan, both governmental and social. No matter what in a broad or narrow sense about the “disables to economic product-ion”, slowly disorganizing families, including “higher investment means higher expenditure” is a caricature of higher educational unemployed, not only these con-stitute a new social structure, but also a deep challenge to ‘economic rationality’ and ‘governmental rationality’ for today.
From a long-term perspective, over dependence upon China’s market and a booming electronics industry will be the primary scenarios of everyday life in Taiwan at the dawn of the 21st century. Meanwhile, a more unknowledgeable, non-essentialist transformation is emerging from different kinds of payroll, income, assets among individuals and households, as well as the increasing irrelevance of strategic power blocs, nouveaux riches, grand bourgeoisie to “the irrelevant people”. This double cracking of the knowing (the known / the unknown) and the real (the real / the non-real) is both problematic of Taiwan’s social development and the effective moment of reflexive sociology (Bourdieu, Beck…) grounded in everyday life. From the con-ceptual construction of periodization, regionalization and systematic operations, the thesis postulates that the complex, changing genetic processes of social realities can-not be substantialized or essentialized as a “thing” or similar. On the contrary, one needs to concrete time (at least chronically and structurally), space (in structural and regional differences), population (statistically), recurrent events and works happened and happening neither consciously nor completely described in Taiwan, and think relationally to those silent ruptures which lead us to an uncertain and still unknown future.