Taiwan’s science parks are magnets for top research personnel and have been called “the invisible heart of the global economy.” The Taipei Neihu Technology Park (facing page) enjoys a fantastic location. The Hsinchu Science Park (this page) established Taiwan’s reputation as a “technology island.” (Hsueh Chi-kuang)

In 1984, Academia Sinica succeeded in bringing Lee Yuan-tseh, then a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a principal investigator with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, back to Taiwan to help establish the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences (IAMS). Two years later, the Nobel Prize winning chemist’s “magnetic attraction” had drawn dozens of other outstanding scientists home to Taiwan. Since then, IAMS has published an array of discoveries in fields including surface physics, laser optics, and chemical dynamics. The renowned US chemist Sylvia T. Ceyer has even gone so far as to state that the US lags far behind Taiwan in chemical dynamics.

In 2001, physicist Paul Chu, a National Cheng Kung University graduate and Academia Sinica academician who has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics several times, was hired by then Hong Kong chief executive Tung Chee Hwa to run the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, a position Chu held for eight years. There, Chu implemented the model utilized by Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study, recruiting outstanding scholars from around the world in an effort to turn HKUST into the “Princeton of the East.” In just a few short years, his efforts catapulted Hong Kong’s youngest university (it was founded in 1991) into the ranks of the world’s top research institutions.

The future of academia and industry is in the hands of talented individuals such as these. With globalization, the battle to recruit such people has become fierce. Faced with aggressive competition from Europe and the US, and the rise of the Greater China economic sphere, what kinds of incentives can Taiwan use to attract international talent? The question has become one of “national security” and demands an immediate response.

If someone were to tell you that the economics department at Taiwan’s top university, National Taiwan University, has been unable to hire new faculty, would you believe them?

“We had six assistant professor positions open in 2010, but were only able to hire one person,” says an exasperated Wang Hung-jen, the department’s chair. “In 2011, we attempted to fill five positions using both the department’s alumni association and a variety of salary incentives, but barely managed to hire three people.”