Subsidies for reshoring: evidence from Taiwan
摘要
This paper empirically investigates the causal effect of subsidies on reshoring in Taiwan. The Taiwanese government has provided subsidies to Taiwanese firms to encourage them to relocate their factories from China back to Taiwan. Using the matched data between firm-level business information and the list of subsidy recipients from 2016 to 2023, we investigate how subsidy recipients change their behavior in both China and Taiwan. To mitigate the bias introduced by the selection mechanism in this subsidy, we employ the doubly robust difference-in-differences method. As a result, we found that this subsidy program has not induced reshoring or relocation of export base from China to Taiwan. Although some recipients expanded their production facilities and increased domestic sales, these changes were not significant enough to increase production and employment in Taiwan. These findings suggest that financial incentives alone are insufficient to offset the structural advantages of established production networks in China.