Taiwan Is One Of Few Nations To See Economic Growth This Pandemic Year

The COVID-19 pandemic has damaged our world like never before. Nearly ten months on, it is still infecting thousands of people every day while claiming hundreds of lives around the world.?

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And the place where it all started has zero new cases springing and lives going back to normal with people partying like nothing even happened. All this has also drastically impacted economies around the world.?

Impact on the world economy

Take for example the Indian economy, where (according to the data by Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation) we have witnessed a 23.9 percent drop in GDP (April-June) than at the same time last year. The United States GDP fell by a whopping 32.9 percent, as reported by government agencies. UK's Office for National Statistics has reported a 21 percent drop in GDP in its recent quarter.?

And oddly enough, this is the case with several nations around the world, with unemployment looming and businesses like restaurants and hotels staying shut due to the ongoing pandemic. These places cannot even think of opening their businesses full-time without risking the number of cases to go through the roof.?

Some nations are healing

However, amidst all this, there were some nations that took control over the cases and didn’t experience as many cases as India or the US are experiencing today -- nations like?New Zealand?which saw a total of 1,835 cases and has zero new cases of COVID-19 today.?Another similar example is of Taiwan?--? a nation that’s neighbouring China, the epicentre for the COVID-19 cases. Taiwan saw a total of just 513 cases and out of this only 7 deaths were reported.

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Taiwan’s on a growth streak

Now, experts believe that?Taiwan?is going to be one of the very few nations to actually have positive growth this year. This is according to Dr Seema Yasmin, Director of Research and Education Programs at? Stanford.?

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And this has been evident from previous reports too. A recent?report?by ‘OurWorldInData’ revealed that Taiwan’s economy experienced the least impact due to COVID-19 -- at roughly 0.6 percent.?

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Even Taiwan’s?Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research?has predicted that Taiwan's economy would experience 1.33 percent growth. Whereas?according to Taiwan’s Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, the growth is predicted to be around 1.56 percent (As of August 14).?

Taiwan & India are very different demographically

Obviously, comparing Taiwan with India doesn’t make sense. Neither is India as developed as Taiwan, nor Taiwan has a population like India -- the nation has a population of just 2.8 crores -- that roughly is the population of Mumbai and Delhi combined.?

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However what has enabled Taiwan's success against COVID-19 isn’t related to the population levels or the extent of development, it’s got more with the discipline of hygiene that has helped them keep the number of cases to a minimum.

Taiwan’s promptness to COVID-19

Firstly, it is due to the fact that Taiwan went into complete pandemic mode the moment the World Health Organisation announced the public health emergency for the novel coronavirus on January 30. Moreover, it went all-in for testing its citizens for the novel coronavirus. As of May this year, it had already conducted 66,460 tests. 65,211 of these were found to be negative.

Even though it had less number of COVID-19 cases, it didn’t skimp on the quarantine measures, locking down areas which had a bunch of cases, as well as quarantining new entrants to the nation for 14 days which it continues to do even today. This went alongside stringent social-distancing norms and the practice of wearing face masks/shields at all times.?

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What is our takeaway from this?

Taiwan’s discipline has helped the nation to come back to a somewhat normal lifestyle with restaurants and hotels opening as well as businesses around the nation functioning like they used to. This will only help the economy of the nation to get back up.

We should take this as an example to continue practising stringent social distancing habits to help reduce the number of cases in our nation to get our economies back to normal.

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