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This paper analyzes the deteriorating income inequality of Taiwan's house- holds over the past three decades through estimates of unconditional distribution and counterfactual decomposition. It is found that changes in the distribution of household characteristics and the corresponding coefficients significantly affect income distribution with prevalent heterogeneities across the conditional quantiles. Aging of the household heads is the main reason to explain the worsening inequality, in addition to changes of the head's schooling and gender, household size, existence of spouse, and earner numbers. Focusing on the changing trends of the distributional pattern of income, this paper sheds new light on the decomposition of Taiwan's income distribution that are different from those presented in the existing studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1999 Chi-Chi, Taiwan, earthquake (Mw 7.6) was the largest earthquake to strike Taiwan in the twentieth century. Its surface rupture extends more than 100 km in a north-south trend. However, the northern end of this surface deformation abruptly terminates at an area between the Tachia river and the Taan river, where a broad pop-up structure with east to northeast strike (quite different from the north-south-striking main thrust) is found. This pop-up structure is composed of several regions of parallel thrusts and back thrusts and total shortening reaches about 9 m. In order to reveal the displacement field in the pop-up structure and slip vectors of branch faults, we use a digital cadastral system with about 17,000 control points to calculate coseismic displacement around the Shihkang area. The digital cadastral system was originally conceived to survey land and building boundaries. The cadastral system affords high-density control points that reach about 2800 points/km², and the accuracy is to within ± 11 cm. Outside of the pop-up structure, the horizontal displacements vectors are 8-9 m in about 330°-340°, changing as they pass through the surface rupture. The azimuth of horizontal displacement shows large variation with the azimuth from 360° to 315° and displacement amounts from about 4-8 m inside the pop-up structure. In addition, according to these cadastral data, we found surface ruptures that had not been observed in previous studies that could be of importance to future disaster assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake, Mw 7.6, ruptured a major thrust fault along the western foothills of the Central Mountain Range of Taiwan. Here, we use cadastral control points to detect horizontal displacement in Taichung, central Taiwan. The cadastral control points were used to identify the coordinates of buildings and acreage. The coordinates of each point are measured by total station and connected to Global Positioning System (GPS) control points. The density of these control points is nearly 36 points/km² and the accuracy of each point is within less than 2-3 cm. The government of Taiwan measured cadastral control points before and after the Chi-Chi earthquake in the Taichung area (northern end of the Chelungpu fault); 1269 control points were measured over a 35-km² area with most control points being located on the hanging wall of the Chelungpu fault. On the footwall, the displacement is about 1.1-1.2 m toward 123° to 128°, which is consistent with GPS data. At the hanging wall, the displacement direction concentrates at 326° to 330°. In the eastern section, the displacement is from 7.5 to 8 m, which is consistent with GPS and strong-motion data, but in the western part displacement changes from 8 m to 4-6 m and then increases again to 8 m along the 326° trending. We conclude that the changes in displacements were controlled by the geometry of the fault plane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Meinong earthquake generated up to ~10 cm surface displacement located 10 - 35 km W of the epicenter and monitored by InSAR and GPS. In addition to coseismic deformation related to the deep earthquake source, InSAR revealed three sharp surface displacement gradients. One of them is extensional and is inconsistent with the westward interseismic shortening of ~45 mm yr-1 in this region. The gradient sharpness suggests slip triggering on shallow structures, some of which were not well documented before. To characterize these shallow structures, we investigated potential surface ruptures in the field. Sets of ~NS tension cracks distributed over 25 - 300 m width, with cumulative extension in the same order as InSAR observations, were found along 5.5 km distance along the extensional gradient and are interpreted as surface rupture. We build two EW regional balanced cross-sections, based on surface geology, subsurface data, and coseismic and interseismic geodetic data. From the Coastal Plain to the E edge of the coseismic deformation area, we propose a series of three active W-dipping back-thrusts: the Houchiali fault, the Napalin-Pitou back-thrust, and the Lungchuan back-thrust. They all root on the 3.5 - 4.0 km deep Tainan detachment located near the base of the 3-km-thick Gutingkeng mudstone. Further E, the detachment would ramp down to ~7 km depth. Coseismic surface deformation measurements suggest that, in addition to the deeper (15 - 20 km) main rupture plane, mostly the ramp, the Lungchuan back-thrust, and the Tainan detachment were activated during or right after the earthquake. Local extension is considered as transient deformation at the W edge of the shallow main slip zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]