Page 476 - 2020新世代·新需求：臺灣教育發展的挑戰研討會

專題研究報告一

第三篇 厚植國際化趨勢下的國家競爭力

leading powers such as US, European counterparts and even BRICs.
These amounting pressures upon East Asia are getting acute due to the

demographic, economic and social transformation in general. The declining birth
rates in these societies have remained at the lowest levels internationally. According
to CIA (2020), these figures in 2020 are much lower than other countries (in 1,000
population) including Japan (7.3), Korea (8.2), Hong Kong (8.4), Taiwan (8.0),

Macau (7.9) and Singapore (8.9). This means these societies might not be able
to sustain the current total population number and have increasing aging groups.
In the long term, this reduced population cannot continue to supply sufficient
manpower or talent to the competitive industries. In addition, though higher

education sectors in this region might have produced many graduates through
massified systems (Chan, 2015; Shin, Postiglione, & Huang 2015), there have been
a consistent mismatch between talent and labour market in relation to quantity and
quality. A global survey conducted by Oxford Economic (2012) has shown that a

few East Asian countries will be under serious shortage of talent in 2021. Figure
1 indicates these notable examples are Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore and other
major western countries. In other words, inflow talent might be required to meet
the demands of employers over the next years. As far as quality is concerned,

the current talent pool seems to be not enough. Figure 2 presents to what extent
employers think how difficult filling jobs. Again, we see East Asia region tops on
this list with high difficulties finding qualified workforce. According to the survey,
the main reason raised is due to ‘labor market talent shortages’ (ManpowerGroup,

2015:20). This seems to suggest that massified higher education systems can’t
effectively address industrial demand, casting doubt on the mismatch between
higher learning and workplace (Chan & Lin, 2016; Yang & Chan, 2020). In other
words, graduates produced domestically in East Asia such as Japan, Taiwan, Korea

might not fit in the industrial needs. Previous analyses and discussions indicate why

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