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CARS AREN'T what they used to be. This is not a petrolhead's lament. It is a statement of technological fact. These days even automobiles powered by a growling V8 engine [...]

CHINA'S WAR games around Taiwan on October 14th broke records for a single-day drill. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) employed 153 aircraft. Taiwan's defence ministry also spotted 26 ships, including [...]

Taiwan had a good pandemic, if anyone did. A medicine-led approach won plaudits for its technical achievements and balanced approach. At the same time, Taiwan took time out to reboot [...]

3. INDUSTRY / Freedom@77 INDUSTRY INDIA AS THE ‘PLUS ONE’ TO CHINA As the world looks beyond China, India can emerge as an alternative only if we are capable of [...]

TO THE MEDIA in Taiwan it sounded like a mafia boss demanding protection money. In an interview published in July Donald Trump said that Taiwan 'should pay us for defence'. [...]

The annual Han Kuang exercises are Taiwan's biggest military drills, focused on countering Chinese invasion. They have also been criticised as being largely a public-relations exercise. In the past Taiwanese [...]

HENRY WANG enjoyed his recent trip to the province of Sichuan. The 22-year-old was in China to attend a camp for young Taiwanese. He spent seven nights in four-star hotels, [...]

JUST 12 STATES recognise Taiwan's government. Others all have relations with the Chinese government in Beijing, and so at least tacitly accept its argument that there is only one China, [...]

With cannons on campus, its own Qing-dynasty wall and the first Dutch fort in Taiwan nearby, National Cheng Kung University seems an appealing place for a budding historian. However, after [...]

When Taiwan's new president, Lai Ching-te, took office in May, his first meeting was with Santiago Peña, the president of Paraguay. It is one of just 12 countries that recognise [...]

A few years ago intelligence analysts observed that internet-connected cctv cameras in Taiwan and South Korea were inexplicably talking to vital parts of the Indian power grid. The strange connection [...]

TWENTY YEARS ago the drone was a rarity in conflict. In 2003, the first year of its war in Iraq, America had a paltry 163 drones, around 1% of its [...]

Taiwan and its semiconductor industry are one of the biggest choke-points in the world economy. Everything from phones to artificial intelligence (AI) models relies on the chips that Taiwan excels [...]

China and Hong Kong stocks fell on Thursday, tracking regional markets lower as investors digested the implications of policymakers in major economies preferring to take a patient approach to monetary [...]

This paper proposes a new methodology based on textual analysis to forecast US recessions. Specifically, it presents an index in the spirit of Baker et al. (JAMA 131:1593-1636, 2016) and Caldara and Iacoviello (JAMA 1222, 2018) that tracks developments in US real activity. When used in a standard recession probability model, this index outperforms the yield curve-based forecast, a standard method to forecast recessions, at medium horizons, up to 8 months. Moreover, the index contains information not included in yield data, that are useful to understand recession episodes; when included as an additional control along with the slope of the yield curve, it improves forecasting accuracy by between 5% and 40%, depending on the horizon considered. These results are stable to a number of different robustness checks, including different estimation methods, different definitions of recession and controlling for asset purchases by major central banks. Our textual analysis data also improve the forecasting accuracy of several other popular leading indicators for the US business cycle. JEL Classification El7 * E47 * E37 * C25 * C53, 1 Introduction There are several empirical regularities in the US business cycle that can be exploited to forecast US recessions. One of them is the widely used yield curve indicator. [...]

There is a wry sense of seen-it-all-before in the crucible of the world's semiconductor industry. When your columnist took the bullet train to Hsinchu Science Park, home to Taiwan Semiconductor [...]

THOUSANDS of people converged on the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan's parliament, on May 28th. Their placards read 'Taiwan for the Taiwanese' and 'Tyranny of the majority is not democracy'. They tied [...]

THOUSANDS GATHERED in front of Taipei's presidential office on May 20th to celebrate the inauguration of William Lai Ching-te, Taiwan's fifth democratically elected president. Among them were 400 supporters from [...]

THERE ARE few places within China's borders where displaying Taiwan's national flag is allowed. One is the Sun Yat-sen Memorial House, a museum in Macau where more than a dozen [...]

Lai Ching-te, who will take office as Taiwan's president on May 20th, has ambitious plans for the island's energy mix. He wants to push the proportion of renewable electricity production [...]

THE LESSON drawn from Russia's invasion of Ukraine is obvious to Taiwanese officials: if you want the world to help in your struggle against an overbearing neighbour, you must first [...]

TO MANY, CLAMBERING up the stairs of a skyscraper does not sound like a fun use of time. But for 'tower-runners' it is a unique, highly competitive sport. Many will [...]

In January 2024, in the run-up to elections in Taiwan, hundreds of video posts appeared on YouTube, Instagram, X and other social platforms entitled 'The Secret History of Tsai Ing-wen'. [...]

GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) is rewriting the disinformation playbook. There is no better place to study this than Taiwan, which, the Swedish Varieties of Democracy Project finds, is subject to [...]