Taiwan’s Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics published its advance estimate for the second quarter on Friday: GDP up 12.92% on a year earlier, 2.39% on the previous quarter after seasonal adjustment, or 9.91% at an annualised rate. Growth for the first half of 2026 came in at 13.72%.
The size of the surprise depends on which of the agency’s own numbers you measure it against. On the year-on-year basis that most coverage uses, the print beat the forecast DGBAS issued on 29 May by 2.09 points, from 10.83% to 12.92%. On the sequential basis — the one that strips out what happened a year ago and shows what the quarter itself did — the agency had pencilled in 0.49% for the quarter, an annualised 1.99%, which is close to a stall. The outturn was 9.91% annualised, a gap of 7.92 points.
The arithmetic carries into the rest of the year without any further assumption. DGBAS published quarterly forecast levels for the third and fourth quarters alongside that May projection; leave both entirely unchanged and the second quarter’s beat on its own lifts full-year 2026 growth from the forecast 9.64% to 10.15%. Two cautions: this is an advance estimate, with the fuller preliminary reading due on 14 August, and DGBAS’s first-quarter preliminary landed 0.86 points above its own advance figure — so the base for all of this is still moving.