TAIPEI (Reuters) – Taiwan wants progress to be accelerated on a long-stalled bilateral investment agreement with the European Union, the island’s President Tsai Ing-wen said on Tuesday.
The EU included Taiwan on its list of trade partners for a possible bilateral investment agreement in 2015, the 12 months before Tsai became Taiwan’s president, nevertheless it has not held talks with Taiwan on the problem since.
While they’re Taiwan’s largest source of foreign investment, the EU and its member states should not have formal diplomatic ties with the democratically ruled island because of objections from China, which considers Taiwan considered one of its provinces.
Meeting a delegation from the European Parliament’s Committee on International Trade, Tsai said Taiwan and the EU should construct a “resilient democratic alliance”.
“Taiwan seeks to boost bilateral economic and trade exchanges, strengthen supply chain security and speed up progress on the Taiwan-EU bilateral investment agreement, which might instil confidence in businesses on each side to expand investments,” she told the group, in comments carried live by the presidential office.
The European Union has been courting Taiwan, a significant semiconductor producer, as considered one of the “like-minded” partners it would love to work with under the European Chips Act unveiled in February.
Delegation leader Anna-Michelle Asimakopoulou told Tsai that the EU and Taiwan shared common values like democracy and human rights.
“The EU recognises that our partnership in trade and investment with Taiwan is a strategic relationship with geopolitical implications,” Asimakopoulou said.
“My colleagues and I within the European Parliament have called on the (European) Commission to launch directly an impact assessment, a public consultation and a scoping exercise for the bilateral investment agreement between the EU and Taiwan,” she added.
While Taiwan and the EU held-high level trade talks in June, lower than every week after that meeting Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC) said it had no concrete plans for factories in Europe.
TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker and Asia’s most precious listed company, flagged last 12 months that it was within the early stages of reviewing a possible expansion into EU member Germany but there appears to have been no substantive progress since then.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
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