The Talent Ledger: How Much Brainpower Does Taiwan Lose Each Year — Do We Actually Know?

The existing data is fragmented.

The Executive Yuan's manpower survey estimates that the number of Taiwanese working abroad is somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000, but the definitions used are vague: how many days abroad counts as "working overseas"? Do accompanying family members count? Do people who hold long-term foreign residency count? Different agencies' figures diverge substantially, and arriving at a reliable number would require cross-agency methodological integration — something no one is currently doing in earnest. ^[1][2]

A few directional facts we can confirm:

First, an educational skew among those who go to the United States. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, Taiwanese Americans have a far higher rate of bachelor's-degree-or-above attainment than the U.S. average, and higher than other Southeast Asian-American groups. This structure suggests Taiwan's talent outflow skews above average in quality. ^[6]

Second, the shift from expatriate assignment to permanent settlement in the semiconductor industry. TSMC, MediaTek, ASE, and other companies have set up new sites in Arizona and Texas in the U.S., in Kumamoto, Japan, and in Dresden, Germany, and they need large numbers of seed engineers from Taiwan headquarters. Many of these engineers were originally sent abroad on the premise of "returning to Taiwan after three to five years," but some have since bought homes and settled in, gradually shifting from expatriate assignment to permanent residence. Both TSMC and MediaTek have acknowledged the talent-repatriation challenge, but neither has published specific figures. ^[7]

Third, a quiet loss of medical and academic talent. Taiwan's National Health Insurance system has kept many primary-care physicians in Taiwan, but in certain highly specialized subfields — neurosurgery, organ-transplant surgery, rare-disease research — Taiwan's domestic workforce is already stretched thin. The cause is not entirely salary; it also includes equipment conditions, research resources, and career ceilings. For Taiwanese surgeons who obtain an international fellowship and complete training at a top medical center, the incentive to stay there is often stronger than the incentive to return.

Pay is not the only factor in talent retention, but it is certainly the biggest.

A mid-career engineer with ten years' experience at a Taiwanese semiconductor plant earns roughly NT$1.2–1.8 million a year, or roughly US$40,000–60,000. An engineer with comparable seniority in a similar role at Intel, NVIDIA, or Qualcomm earns a total annual compensation — base salary plus stock compensation — of US$150,000–300,000. ^[5]

That's a gap of three to five times. For a 28-year-old who just finished a master's degree and is facing Taipei's high housing prices, this number is not abstract.

Some will say, "Taiwan's cost of living is lower, so a lower salary makes sense." That argument has some merit, but even adjusted for purchasing power, the gap still exceeds one time over; and the more fundamental issue is that if the gap in wealth-accumulation speed is this large, the ultimate decision usually rests not on current consumption levels but on the difference in assets ten or twenty years down the road.

In high-priced Taiwan, a mid-level engineer needs to work — without eating or drinking, so to speak — for more than thirty years to buy a 30-ping apartment (a Taiwanese unit of floor area) in Taipei. The same position in Austin, Texas, or Chandler, Arizona, could cover a down payment with three to five years of savings. This math is shaping many people's decisions about whether to stay or go.

Taiwan's talent problem is not caused by a single factor — it is the product of several structural problems stacked on top of each other.

Structural problem one: the devaluation of degrees caused by the overexpansion of higher education. In the late 1990s, Taiwan allowed a large number of technical colleges to upgrade to university status, creating a glut of university degrees while simultaneously diluting the market-signaling function of a degree. Young people earn a bachelor's degree only to find wages remain low; meanwhile, the growth of high-education-requiring job openings has not kept pace with the growth of the highly educated population, producing a structural bind of "high credentials, low job quality." ^[8]

Structural problem two: R&D investment insufficient to support high-wage employment. Taiwanese companies' R&D spending as a share of GDP is not low (roughly 3–3.5%), but it is heavily concentrated in a small number of leading firms such as TSMC, Delta Electronics, and MediaTek. The broader base of small and medium-sized manufacturers does relatively little R&D and struggles to offer enough high-paying R&D positions. Young engineers' career paths have long depended excessively on openings released by a handful of large firms, and those openings are inherently skewed toward an employer's market.

Structural problem three: immigration-policy liberalization lagging far behind the talent gap. Taiwanese society has consistently held a relatively conservative attitude toward immigration; institutional channels for highly skilled immigration (such as the Employment Gold Card program) remain complicated, review processes are slow, and language barriers also limit the pool of potential candidates. For highly skilled talent from Southeast Asia, Taiwan is not a top destination of choice — Singapore, Japan, and Australia have better-developed systems, higher pay, and greater cultural receptiveness.

Key contradiction: Taiwan needs to import a large amount of skilled migrant labor to fill its workforce gap, while at the same time its immigration policy debate is still cautiously focused on "how to avoid letting foreigners take jobs from Taiwanese" — even though those vacant positions are ones Taiwanese people were never going to fill in the first place. If this contradiction is not resolved at the policy level, wage subsidies alone will struggle to work.

Even if the talent outflow stopped completely today, Taiwan's labor-supply problem would still be unsolved.

Taiwan's total fertility rate is estimated to have fallen to 0.87 in 2025, ranking dead last or second-to-last in the world (competing with South Korea for this dubious distinction). ^[3] This means the babies born today will not enter the labor market for eighteen to twenty-two years — and by the time they do, the number of new entrants will be more than a third smaller than it is today.

The math is unforgiving: Taiwan cannot solve its long-term labor problem through its domestic birth rate alone. That means that, however politically difficult it may be to accept, a large-scale, systematic skilled-immigration policy is an option Taiwan cannot avoid facing. Taiwan really has only two choices: proactively design an immigration policy, or passively wait for industry to go find people somewhere easier. The latter is already happening — the U.S., Japan, and Europe competing to host TSMC's plants is, in essence, also a way of positioning for the talent of the future.

This is not a problem with "no solution." Taiwan has the resources, the technology ecosystem, and the social capital — but it needs a concentrated policy will.

Directions that can be executed immediately:

First, build a complete talent-ledger database. This sounds basic, but it genuinely does not exist today. It would require DGBAS, the National Immigration Agency, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Labor to integrate their data before a credible net inflow/outflow figure — broken down by skill category, age group, and destination — can be produced. Without this ledger, other policies will inevitably miss their mark.

Second, build wage-subsidy mechanisms targeting key shortage positions. For positions in semiconductors, aerospace, biopharmaceuticals, and the defense industry where hiring is genuinely impossible, Taiwan could emulate Israel's "talent repatriation incentive program," offering three to five years of wage subsidies or tax reductions to lower the opportunity cost of returning to Taiwan.

Third, substantially overhaul PhD stipends at top universities. PhD students at Taiwan's top universities currently earn a monthly stipend of NT$12,000–18,000, which is completely uncompetitive against recruiting competition from the U.S. and Japan. Raising doctoral scholarships to internationally competitive levels is a basic investment in retaining the very top young researchers.

What requires genuine political will to push through at the policy level:

An open, fast, large-scale channel for skilled immigration. Taiwan needs to convert at least 30,000–50,000 skilled migrant workers into permanent residents each year to structurally ease its labor pressure. The current Employment Gold Card program issues no more than a few thousand cards a year — nowhere near sufficient in scale.

One of Taiwan's core geopolitical assets is its accumulation of semiconductor talent. What makes TSMC hard to replicate is not just its equipment and processes, but the tens of thousands of engineers who have worked in its fabs for ten to twenty years, accumulating process know-how that is difficult to put into words. This accumulation of talent is one of Taiwan's most important strategic moats. ^[9]

But a moat is not a permanent feature of the landscape — it is a dynamic process, dug by some and filled in by others every day. As talent keeps flowing out and the pace of domestic replenishment declines because of the falling birth rate, the moat doesn't disappear — it slowly gets shallower.

The question Taiwan ultimately needs to answer is: do we deserve to keep our best people? This is not just a matter of wages — it concerns what kind of society this wants to be: a place where the smartest people want to build their careers, or just one stop along the global talent pipeline.