Forum highlights ‘new poverty’

from the Taipei Times

It’s time for the government to rethink its social security and immigration policy as the nation faces challenges such as “new poverty” and an increasing flow of immigrants through marriage, academics specializing in labor, social welfare and immigration issues told a forum in Taipei yesterday.

Wang Yung-tzu, a professor at National Taiwan Normal University’s (NTNU) Graduate Institute of Social work, pointed out that while poverty has always existed in Taiwan, rapid urbanization and interconnection in people’s economic lives have created a “new poverty” that needs to be dealt with differently.

“In the rapidly changing economic environment, people have developed different ideas on who is responsible for poverty,” Wang told the forum, which was organized by the Institute for National Policy Research and the Hsu Chao-ing Charity Foundation.

“In 1997, more than 50 percent of the people considered personal factors such as not working hard enough and spending too much money to be causes of poverty,” she said, citing figures from Academia Sinica.

Statistics also show that nearly 48 percent of people at the time believed “no employment opportunities” to be the cause of poverty — but the number increased to nearly 63 percent last year.

Meanwhile, more than 70 percent of people last year said that the government should work harder to create more job opportunities.

“This goes to show that when dealing with ‘new poverty,’ the government should not put responsibility completely on individuals and overlook social factors,” Wang said.

Saying that the government has not offered a complete social security system to help people escape poverty but only tried to hand out pensions, Cheng Li-chen, a social work professor at National Taiwan University, said that the government should quit its “patronizing” mentality and provide job training or assistance for families in poverty to participate in economic activities.

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