As the economy continues to recover, the unemployment rate fell for a fifth straight month to 5.68 percent last month, the lowest percentage in the past 12 months, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate also contracted for a fifth consecutive month to 5.73 percent last month, down 0.04 percentage points from the previous month, the statistics agency said.
“The decline was caused by increased temporary jobs before the Lunar New Year [holiday] and the economic recovery,” DGBAS Deputy Director Liu Tian-syh (劉天賜) told a media briefing.
The number of people without work dropped 6,000 to 626,000 last month. Of those, about 315,000 had been laid off, down 2,000 from the previous month, the seventh straight monthly decline, Liu said.
At the end of December, the employed population in the industrial and service sectors increased for the seventh straight month to 6.41 million, representing the highest number in the past 12 months, the DGBAS report showed.
Asked whether the jobless rate would continue to fall, Liu said that it would depend on the pace of the economic recovery, adding that unemployment usually bounces back up a little bit after the Lunar New Year because of decreased demand for temporary workers.
Unemployment among the middle-aged, however, increased to 142,000 people last month, an increase of 17,000, or 13.82 percent, the report showed. The figure was only 1,000 less than the record high of 143,000 set last July.
Liang Kuo-yuan (梁國源), president of the Taipei-based Polaris Research Institute (寶華綜合經濟研究院), expressed optimism on the employment market, saying that unemployment would continue to decline given the current momentum of economic growth.
“It will take more than 10 months for the jobless rate to drop to below 4 percent, however,” Liang said.
Last year, average monthly income, which includes regular wages, overtime and bonuses, contracted 4.31 percent year-on-year, the largest contraction since 1980, to NT$42,509, the report said.
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Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day