工業化程度遞降問題之探討

1980年代中期起，台灣製造業盛極轉衰，製造業占總實質GDP與總就業的比率呈現明顯遞降趨勢，二者由1987年歷史高峰的36.0%及35.2%，分別降至1992年的30.0%及30.1%，引發當時學者專家對台灣經濟是否已步入歐、美、日工業先進國家「產業空洞化」(industrial hollowing)後塵的疑慮。

Deindustrialization, a natural phenomenon that refers to secular decline in the shares of manufacturing in real GDP and total employment, can be attributed to factors on both the demand and supply sides. On the demand side is a shift in the pattern of demand from food to manufactured products and later to services, which reflects the upgrading of living standards, and which steers development of the industrial structure from agriculture-based to manufacture-dominated and then to the post-industrial service era. On the supply side is the rapid growth of labor productivity in manufacturing, which means that less labor input is needed to produce the required manufactured goods, and hence the share of manufacturing employment falls. This suggests that deindustrialization is a positive phenomenon.
The process of industrialization took between one and one-and-a-half centuries in most advanced economies. Once the process had run its full course, these economies began to experience deindustrialization, and most of them have faced a prolonged manufacturing trade deficit. Empirical studies have demonstrated the primary role of both demand-side and supply-side factors in such deindustrialization. Taiwan experienced the onset of deindustrialization in 1988. However, it lasted for only five years, since which the shares of manufacturing in GDP and total employment have remained at a comparatively steady level. Empirical study shows that the residual effect, which refers to all the effects except for the total internal growth and total trade effects, has been far larger in Taiwan’s case than in the cases of other advanced economies.