ABSTRACT
This chapter re-examines the development of Taiwan’s economy and provides some new insights into Taiwan’s success story by using an institutional approach to see if the government has been instrumental in enhancing private sector competitiveness by looking at the rapid development of the Taiwan’s information technology industry in the past ten to fifteen years. It uses the Taiwan’s information technology industry to re-examine the role of the government and to single out some important institutional elements that have contributed to the outstanding performance of the integrated circuits and personal computer industries. Since big multinational electronic firms were the largest investor at the time, the transferred technologies gave Taiwan a healthy start when the government decided to develop the information technology industry. Taiwan’s information technology (IT) industry demonstrates how internationally competitive its manufacturing enterprise has become in the past two decades.
