The East region includes Taitung County and Hualien       County.

     The cities and counties included in the four regions have a total land area of around 36,000 square kilometers. Because Taiwan is an island with wide mountainous areas and not all land suitable for building factories, it is better to make an adjustment of the land area figure by deducting the mountainous areas. With available land areas in mountain rural townships, it is possible to at least subtract them to get an adjusted land area for each region that may be considered for industrial establishments. The result is listed in Table 2.
(Table 2 here)

     The adjusted land area shown in Table 2 reveals that with the mountain rural townships excluded, only 56 percent of Taiwan's land area is left for consideration. As shown in Table 3, the land area used by Taiwan's manufacturing industries increased from 58.66km²in 1966 to 242.61 km²in 1996, an increase of four times in 30 years. In 1996, the land used by manufacturing establishments accounted for 1.2 percent of the land area, excluding mountain rural townships, and almost all of it was distributed along the western part of Taiwan from north to south. In terms of density per square kilometer, there was 15 manufacturing establishments per square kilometer in the North region in 1996; this was almost a double the average. Compared with the number in 1966, the density had increased seven-fold in the North; while on the average, the increase was 5.5 times.
(Table 3 here)

     In addition to land area used by manufacturing establishments in the regions, comparisons can also be made with the number of people engaged and annual earnings paid. The data are listed in Table 4 and consist of two parts. Part (1) shows the percentage of personnel employed in manufacturing and part (2) that of annual earnings paid. It is clear that the North had a share of around 50 percent in these two aspects throughout the entire study period. This further demonstrates the concentration of manufacturing in northern Taiwan.
(Table 4 here)

     Comparison can be further made with per capita earnings. The data are listed in Table 5 in two parts: (1) at current price and (2) in 1996 prices with growth rate calculated with the total. Figure 5 shows the earning per person in 1996 prices. It is clear that earnings per person in the Central region fell below the average throughout the entire period and ranked at the bottom except in 1986.