Taiwan has been admitted into World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2002. Changes in both industrial structure and employment structure are inevitable. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of Taiwan's WTO accession on female-male labor demand. The method adopted in this paper is a two-step approach in the context of the dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) analysis. The major finding from our quantitative assessment is that due to fast expansion in services sectors female labor demand increases dramatically with an annual rate of 1.2% during 2002-2006. In contrast, male labor demand is projected to increase with an annual rate of only 0.5% during the same period. The relocation of low-skilled and less competitive industries to foreign countries will lower the growth rate of labor demand for male, female as well as non-technical workers. For the younger people seeking employment opportunities, job-training programs should be carried out to help them transfer to the services sectors.

The elderly population has been increasing rapidly in recent years due to the improvement in medical care, fertility decline and economic development. In this paper, the trends of aging were discussed. We used Taiwan complete life tables to analyze the contribution of the increment of life expectancy of each age between two consecutive life tables. The results showed that ages 0 to 1 had the largest contribution, and more than 50% of the increment of mean life expectancy was contributed by ages 50 to 89. The aging trend is significant in Taiwan. Therefore, in this paper, we compared the mortality improvement trends between Taiwan and two supper-aged countries, Japan and Sweden. We also compared the differences in the contribution of improvement in mortality of different age groups on life expectancy at age 0 between two consecutive life tables. Finally, we used the estimated mortality improvement models to evaluate the annuity pricing under cohort life table consideration.

Poverty measurements are ways to assess the relative economic well-being of different household types, subpopulations and geographic regions of a society. The main objective of this study is to seek ways to correct potential biases against the welfare benefit of the disadvantaged groups. In addition, it is very crucial to assess the effectiveness of the public policies and the relevant institutions. In the meantime, it is also necessary to investigate whether the objectives of public policies have been achieved. The poverty measurements formulated in this study will enable us to assess the effectiveness of public policies and institutions and help us determine whether the basic economic needs are met of various households, subpopulations and regions.
In the past twenty years, official poverty rates were all below one percentage point. A substantial body of poverty research considered the poverty thresholds too stringent. The present paper is an attempt to use various estimates to simulate more appropriate poverty thresholds and to explore their effects on the composition of poverty population. In this study, the results of various simulated poverty thresholds show that individual level of poverty rates falls somewhere between 3.37% and 4.86%; while household level of poverty rates lies around 4.39% and 5.76%. Further analyses indicate that female-headed households, of which householders are divorced/windowed or sixty years older; and that households headed by persons less than twenty years or over sixty years or single person, are more likely to fall below poverty thresholds under all measures.

The total fertility rates in Taiwan area have been falling rapidly since 1960's, which reached a record low 1.4 in 2001, and trigger the population aging in Taiwan area. Possible causes attributing to this rapid decrease include more opportunities of higher education and employment for the female, which generally are treated as two of the main reasons for the delay of childbearing. However, the falling of fertility rates vary quite a lot in different age groups, and thus most well-known fertility models (such as Gamma and Lee-Carter models) fail to produce accurate predictions.
In this paper, we shall extend the study of Huang and Yue (2002) and continue looking for acceptable fertility projection models. The models considered in this study include, in addition to traditional models for age-specific fertility rates, models for cohort fertility rate (CFR), age-and-parity specific birth rate, and diffusion. Data from 1949 to 1996 (or 1975 to 1996 for age-and-parity specific birth rate) are used as a pilot for verifying the model which has the best fit for data gathered from 1997 to 2001. We also consider the effect of Chinese zodiac to adjust the prediction values. We find that simpler models, such as individual group estimation, have smaller prediction errors comparing the complicated models such as the CFR model.