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The science policy has been at the core business of contemporary nations, and determining how to establish a constructive contract between the wider society and the science/academia community has become a continuous challenge and major task. The purpose of this paper is to draw on Bush’s (1945) classical works and other scholarly stances in an attempt to reveal how research funding discourses and practices in Taiwanese universities have taken shape and been implemented.

Against this broader context, the authors examine the main elements of official documents and significant statistical evidence from recent years.

In summary, basic research investment has comparatively underperformed while the business sector has contributed relatively higher expenditures to the university sector at the international level. A strong state-led approach has been identified as the key characteristics of research funding policy for industrial development/economic growth or social problem solving. Although not making an effort to “save the nation,” the state has been dominant in steering the direction of priority areas and issues for university research in order to achieve better international competitiveness and, in turn, nation building.

The authors examine the impact of the interplay between science’s social contract with society and rhetorical devices on the institutionalization of the university research funding policy framework in Taiwan. The exploration of this interplay leads the authors to elaborate tensions between the government, industry, universities, and research communities in Taiwan. As in other contexts, the race between social accountability and academic autonomy has evolved to be a significant element of these tensions in Taiwan. For better reflecting the public needs or social demands, a greater autonomy for the science community is desirable and favorable for long-term development.

The science policy is a rarely addressed but critical issue for the past two decades. Along with the increasing demand on value for money publicly funded research, societal accountability, and the international competition caused by league tables and cutting-edge technology innovation, this paper draws on classical and current mainstream discourses of science’s contract with society by investigating into Taiwanese research funding in the higher education sector. All findings are highly original for theoretical and practical implications.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how customers’ perceptions of service quality, product quality, and price fairness influence their loyalty to a particular service provider. Based on the results of a pilot study, we have elected to study banks, auto repair and maintenance shops, and (gasoline) filling stations, each of which are characterized by differing degrees of intangible service provision. Our results show that customer satisfaction either fully or partially mediates the relationship between consumers’ perceptions and their loyalty. The direct or indirect effects on customer loyalty of the perception of product and service quality, as well as of perceived price fairness, are related to the differing levels of intangible service associated with each of the three different service industries.

This chapter explores two comparative longitudinal cases studies involving policy entrepreneurs inside and outside government in Taiwan. From 2003 to 2007, the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan played the conventional role of policy entrepreneur to initiate the “University Corporation Project.” Through this project, the MOE sought to transform all national universities in Taiwan into independent entities, gaining them more autonomy and increasing their accountability as well. From 2008 to 2014, as a policy entrepreneur outside the government, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) took the lead and proposed the “University Autonomous Governance Project.” This project sought an alternative solution based on public universities’ needs to improve university autonomy and accountability.

The method undertaken in this study includes document analysis and participants’ observation. First, both policy entrepreneurs adopted the strategy of power sharing, but the effectiveness of the strategy is determined by the interaction between policy entrepreneurs and stakeholders. Moreover, facing a multiple-principals condition in both cases, both policy entrepreneurs should negotiated with or compete with other potential agenda competitors. Those findings will be a detailed roadmap for policy makers in East Asia once they plan to initiate policy entrepreneurship in their countries.

It is quite possible that financial institutions including life insurance companies would encounter turbulent situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic before policies mature. Constructing models that can generate scenarios for major assets to cover abrupt changes in financial markets is thus essential for the financial institution's risk management.

The key issues in such modeling include how to manage the large number of risk factors involved, how to model the dynamics of chosen or derived factors and how to incorporate relations among these factors. The authors propose the orthogonal ARMA–GARCH (autoregressive moving-average–generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity) approach to tackle these issues. The constructed economic scenario generation (ESG) models pass the backtests covering the period from the beginning of 2018 to the end of May 2020, which includes the turbulent situations caused by COVID-19.

The backtesting covering the turbulent period of COVID-19, along with fan charts and comparisons on simulated and historical statistics, validates our approach.

This paper is the first one that attempts to generate complex long-term economic scenarios for a large-scale portfolio from its large dimensional covariance matrix estimated by the orthogonal ARMA–GARCH model.