Meng-Chun Liu

• PhD
• Managing Director at Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research

Since its emergence in 2020, COVID‐19 has profoundly influenced the Taiwan economy and employment landscape, leading to differential impacts across sectors. In response to this unprecedented crisis, the Taiwanese government promptly enacted the “Special Regulations on the Prevention and Rescue of Severe Specific Infectious Pneumonia” on February 25...

This study integrates the offshore subsidiary (OS) development (OSD) and smile curve paradigms to examine the impact of local procurement on OSs' functional upgrading of value chains (VCs) in China. Based on an offshore subsidiary development framework with headquarters-driven, internal subsidiary-driven, and host economy-driven, we draw on Taiwan-...

The concept of the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) has become increasingly popular among policymakers because of its potential to drive economic growth. In many countries, the promotion of EE has been linked with innovation policy but little research has been done to examine whether such policy can facilitate EE’s development. Using the case study m...

The question of why some developing countries succeed in catching up technologically with developed countries while others fail to do so has attracted considerable interest among academics and policy makers. Since the notion of ‘middle-income trap’ emerged in the mid-2000s, the question has grown even more popular.

This research note investigates the nature of Taiwan's economic links with Southeast Asia. While it is assumed that the economic links are driven by investment and formal trade agreements, we identify a more intertwined dynamic of "deep integration" through Global Value Chains (GVCs). We first examine the macro data of Taiwanese direct investment a...

In the recent years, the ‘manufacturing servitization’ has been put at the center of Taiwan's industrial policies in order to solve the low value-added problem. In pursuit of regional development rebalance, industrial and technology policies are also hired to revitalize weak industrial clusters by using R&D grants and leveraging the capabilities of...

China has become a hot spot of R&D internationalization and a growing number of Taiwan-based firms have indeed set up R&D units in China. Taking into account China’s substantial regional variations in economic development, innovation capacity, and knowledge productivity, such notions as regional innovation system (RIS) and local innovative milieu m...

Through depicting a typology of regions, the study intends to capture the diversity of regional innovation systems across China. Based on the theories of Regional Innovation Systems (RIS), we select several variables related to the capabilities of a region regarding generate, to absorb, and to diffuse the knowledge generation, absorption, and diffu...

► What locational advantages of a host RIS affect the network linkages of MNCs’offshore R&D units? ► We establish a link between the literature of R&D internationalization and that of RIS. ► We show the links between MNCs’ offshore innovation network and the host RIS.

To come to terms with the realization of ASEAN+1, Taiwan had concluded with mainland China a special free trade agreement (FTA), the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) in June 2010. This framework agreement provides an early harvest agreement of near-term tariff elimination, including detailed product schedules for goods and services f...

In Taiwan's national innovation system, the Government-Sponsored Research Institutes (GSRIs) facilitate technology assimilation and/or transfer and cooperative R&D promotion in support of firms, and also act as a policy assistant. Drawing on the dataset of the "Local Industry Innovation Engine Program", the study quantitatively compares various typ...

This study attempts to estimate the effects of internet adoption on reducing corruption by using a panel consisting of 70 countries covering the period from 1998 to 2005. The results of Granger causality tests reveal that, while causality running from internet adoption to corruption reduction can be established, the causality between internet adopt...

The issue of primary interest to this study is the collaboration that has taken place in science and technology (S&T) research in China. Due to our empirical evidences, the regions with higher relationship (network) capital enjoy higher knowledge productivity in terms of published articles. Our purpose in this paper is to investigate the relationsh...

This paper examines how geographically inter-organisational networks affect innovative performance of firms located in industrial clusters, especially the Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park (HSIP) in Taiwan. Based on an exhaustive manual search of the United Daily News Group database, 1445 inter-organisational alliances were identified in the pe...

In this study we examine the relationship between governance and agricultural performance by employing the World Bank’s Aggregate Governance Indicators. Based on a cross-country panel sample, two methods are employed to test the hypothesis that better governance fosters agricultural productivity. The empirical results of both methods support the hy...

With the advance of globalization, R&D internationalization has become a trend, with the outreach including the less-advanced economies. This paper sets out to examine empirically the factors underlying R&D intensity of the Taiwan-based MNCs in China for 2003–06, with a specific focus on the effect of their cross-border technology linkages and R&D...

As one of leading countries in the digital economy, Taiwan has a significantly higher number of Internet hosts per capita. With Taiwan's manufacturing sector as a case study, this paper aims to explore the determinants of e-commerce adoption by manufacturers. Drawing on the database of the recent industrial census, the empirical results show that h...

Corporate R&D, previously concentrated in the home country, has since the 1980s been part of an escalating process of internationalization. Furthermore, inward and outward internationalization, once a developed country-centric phenomenon, is increasingly involving catch-up and emerging countries, Given the above-mentioned backdrop, this paper sets...

The past few decades have witnessed a widening of the digital divide among countries in the world. Bridging this global digital divide has now become an important development policy of many governments in the developing world. Differing from previous studies that look at the Internet's popularity, this paper focuses on the speed of diffusion of suc...

This article carries out agricultural production function estimations, based on data for the period 1995–2000 on 81 countries, to present empirical evidence on the relationship between the adoption of information and communication technology (ICT) and agricultural productivity. It is found that new ICT has a significantly positive impact on agricul...

This chapter examines the impact of locational advantage and research and development (R&D) on international trade focusing on the case of Taiwan. The findings reveal that those sectors with a larger pool of R&D labor tend to attract more foreign affiliates' R&D activities. The result also suggests that foreign affiliates with higher R&D intensity...

Although it is evident that R&D has undergone a process of internationalization, and that the less-advanced economies are becoming increasingly involved in this process, the substantial body of literature in this area has been based largely on the experiences of the developed countries. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of this iss...

Although it is evident that R&D has undergone a process of internationalization, and that the less-advanced economies are becoming increasingly involved in this process, the substantial body of literature in this area has been based largely on the experiences of the developed countries. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of this iss...

It has long been recognized by economists that there is a systematic connection between the progress in economic productivity and the growth of cities. Yang and Rice (1994) develop a general equilibrium model to explain this intrinsic connection. Their model shows that in an economy, one of the functions of cities is to be able to improve transacti...

This paper investigates the role of production networks in determining the pattern of international trade. Using Taiwan's trade data for 1991, production networks are found to have a discernible impact on the pattern of trade, aside from the variables typically envisaged by conventional and new trade theories, including factor proportions and techn...

This paper attempts to account for the success of policy reform in Taiwan's trade liberalization through an investigation of the periods 1986–92, and 1992–95. The objective is to undertake an empirical examination of Haggard et al.'s (The political feasibility of adjustment in developing countries. Development Centre of the OECD, OECD, Paris, 1995)...

Imperfect measurement of uncertainty (deeper uncertainty) in climate sensitivity is introduced in a two-sectoral integrated assessment model (IAM) with endogenous growth, based on an extension of DICE. The household expresses ambiguity aversion and can use robust control via a `shadow ambiguity premium' on social carbon cost to identify robust clim...

This paper develops a Ricardian model with transaction costs and endogenous and exogenous comparative advantages. It shows that the level of division of labour and trade increases as transaction conditions improve. It identifies the conditions for trade negotiations that result in zero tariff rates and the conditions for the coexistence of unilater...

We develop and implement a collocation method to solve for an equilibrium in the dynamic legislative bargaining game of Duggan and Kalandrakis (2008). We formulate the collocation equations in a quasi-discrete version of the model, and we show that the collocation equations are locally Lipchitz continuous and directionally differentiable. In numeri...

This paper empirically ascertains the determinants of technology deepening, which is defined as the advance from simple applications of ICTs (information and Communication Technologies) to more complex ones in the operation of a firm, by examining the adoption of the Internet and EDI by Taiwanese firms. Using survey data obtained from a sample of 3...

This study attempts to empirically examine the impact of democracy on agricultural productivity by estimating a cross-country agricultural production function. In the regressions, we control the education, economic freedom, climate and geographic variables, in order to see if democracy can still explain a significant portion of the heterogeneity of...

ABSTRACT Asin recent literatures, the development of industrial clusters is recognized as a dimension,of industrial policies toward enhancing firms’ productivity. Few empirical studies are performed ,to figure ,out the important effects of industrial cluster upon productivities. This paper extends the traditional studies upon productivity, which ma...

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of industrial clusters in the formation and development of new ventures as well as entrepreneurship. We take Taiwan as an example; the empirical works are conducted first by a look at the contingency table of incumbents and new firms' regional distribution to see their geographic linkage. Th...

Against the backdrop of China's ongoing institutional transformation toward a market economy, innovation activities have been changed quite dramatically, especially since the late 1990s. Market-based science and technology policy reforms tailoring the objective of bridging the gap between the science and industry sectors has increasingly achieved a...