On December 20, 2012, the Taiwanese Executive Yuan approved amendments to the respective Statutes for Investment by Foreign Nationals and by Overseas Chinese (i.e. persons from the PRC). The most important change is the abolishment of the requirement to seek prior approval for the investment, subject to exceptions in terms of value - projects worth more than US$ 1 million will still need approval - and for sensitive sectors such as telecommunication, banking and insurance, television, shipping and flight services etc. The amendment proposals are being sent to the Legislative Yuan for adoption. Taiwan Today estimates that 80 per cent of inbound FDI will be exempted from requesting prior approval.
For this measure, the affected trading partners and sectors indicated are those that had inbound FDI positions of more than US$ 1 million in Chinese Taipei in January-November 2011(latest available data on the Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs Investment Commission website), excluding the above-mentioned sensitive sectors .