In addition to describing the history of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Taiwan, the government's measures to contain the outbreak, and the actual economic impacts of SARS on Taiwan's economy, this paper presents the results of a multiregional computable general equilibrium model (Global Trade Analysis Project model version 6.2) that predicts the outbreak's consequences to 31 service and manufacturing sectors in Taiwan and to the GDP of 16 regions. The results of a short-term outbreak (less than 1 year), taking into account capital accumulation, are compared with those of a longer outbreak (more than 1 year). The losses to GDP are also predicted for the cases in which (1) China provides complete information on its SARS cases and (2) it fails to fully disclose the progress of the outbreak there to the international community. For a short-term outbreak, the simulation predicts losses to GDP of the service and manufacturing sectors of 0.67 percent in Taiwan, 0.20 percent in mainland China, and 1.56 percent in Hong Kong. If SARS is a long-run phenomenon, a lack of transparent disclosure about the progress of SARS on the part of the Chinese authorities could cause an additional 1.6 percent decline in China's GDP, according to the simulation. Copyright (c) 2004 Center for International Development and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Joining the GATT has been established as one of the most important economic and political targets of the Taiwan government. However, the effects of this action are difficult to establish. Because of the openness of Taiwan's domestic market there could be serious changes in the production structure and income distribution, especially in the relative status of the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors, of protected and unprotected sectors, and also of producers and consumers. The possible high cost of this move on society has caused its necessity to be questioned. In order to clear up the controversy surrounding this issue, this paper, uses a CGE model to analyse the possible effects of this policy change. Following proposals from the Final Draft of the Uruguay Round, we use tariff and nontariff barriers, aggregate measurement of support (AMS), and export quota in our model as policy tools. We omit liberalization in the service sector, because of quantification difficulties. Our analysis includes the impacts on resource allocation, production structure, income distribution and consumers' welfare.

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It has been experimentally and theoretically found that the critical applied stress intensity factor for indentation cracking also depends linearly on the reciprocal of the square root of crack length when the indentation fracture technique is used to measure residual stresses in thin films.

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