The nation’s unemployment rate before seasonal adjustment rose for the first time in four months last month after school graduates entered the job market, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The unemployment rate inched up 0.02 percentage points to 5.16 percent last month without considering seasonal factors, compared with 5.14 percent in May, the DGBAS statistics showed.
The statistics agency attributed the increase primarily to new graduates looking for jobs. The number of unemployed rose to 570,000, an increase of 3,000 people from May.
After seasonal adjustment, the unemployment rate improved to 5.2 percent last month, down 0.02 percentage points from the previous month, as local corporations increased hiring after a rebound in business, DGBAS Deputy Director Liu Tian-syh (劉天賜) told a media briefing.
Because of the robust economic recovery and the government’s various employment initiatives, companies were prompted to hire, with the number of employed people increasing 0.23 percent last month from a month earlier to 10,483,000 people, Liu said.
“Without these incentive programs, last month’s jobless rate would have reached 5.61 percent,” Liu said.
The number of jobs in public service created by the programs increased to a record high of 1,057,000 last month, up 98,000 from October 2008, before the financial crisis broke, DGBAS said.
Liu said that 107,000 more jobs needed to be created and that the number of people out of work would be cut by another 14,000 if the government were to bring the unemployment rate down to below 5 percent by the end of the year.
Cheng Cheng-mount (鄭貞茂), chief economist at Citigroup Taiwan Inc, said it was likely that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate would drop to below the government’s target by year’s end because unemployment dropped 0.4 percentage points to 5.2 percent in the second quarter from the first quarter.
“Based on the current pace of decline, unemployment could decrease to below 5 percent [by the end of this year],” Cheng said, but he added that it was still worthwhile to observe whether demand for human resources from enterprises would decrease in the following months.
About 126,000 middle-aged people were unemployed last month, 3,000 more than in May, although the number was still lower than the pre-crisis level, DGBAS said, blaming seasonal factors.
“That was just a short-term phenomenon,” Liu said.
In the first half of this year, unemployment averaged 5.47 percent, down 0.26 percentage points compared with the same period last year, with the number of people without work reaching 602,000, down 21,000 from a year ago, DGBAS data showed.
“This indicates that the economy is showing signs of recovery and that manpower demand from enterprises has increased. Growth momentum in the labor market has picked up,” Liu said.
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