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In the revised November dataset, Taiwan's budget deficit of -1.0 percent
estimated in July 2015 was revised to +0.1 percent in November 2015. Therefore,
the theme of this paper that Taiwan has the fiscal space to spare does not
change, rather, the new revised dataset has reinforced our argument. Thus, we
continue to use the July dataset in the text.
Table A1 also present the average and the median budgets of 35 OECD
and 28 EU countries. Note that the proportion of budget deficits countries in
each group is almost the same as the world proportion, but the average and the
median of budget deficits as well as the budget surplus are much less than those
of the world. This indicates that the rest of the world is generally less prudent with
regard to budget deficit than the OECD and the EU countries.
Figure A1 reproduces Figure 3 using the revised data. The frequency
distributions appear to be similar, and the group of countries we are interested
are also clustered between 1 percent to -4 percent. Taiwan's fiscal position
improved from Interval 13 in the old data to Interval 11 in the revised data. Its
position is the same as German's, second (only next to Hong Kong) among all
the countries of our interest listed in the lower part of the figure. This reinforces
our contention that Taiwan has an ample fiscal space to use.
109
Taiwan Economic Forum
Volume 14, Number 4
