The unemployment rate, a lagging economic indicator, unexpectedly rose to 4.3 percent last month from 4.28 percent in September, indicating that economic growth may weaken in the near future, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
Taiwan’s unemployment rate is higher than that of export rivals Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore, which have unemployment rates between 2 percent and 3.3 percent, the DGBAS statement said.
On an annual basis, the unemployment rate was 0.62 percentage points lower than the 4.92 percent posted in October last year, the statement said.
The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, an indicator of long-term trends, rose 0.03 percentage points from the previous month to 4.3 percent last month, marking the second-lowest rate since October 2008.
“This is the third time since 2001 that October’s unemployment rate has risen from a month earlier,” Chen Min (陳憫), a deputy director at the statistics bureau, told a press conference.
For the past 10 years, Taiwan’s unemployment rate has only risen month-on-month in October in 2001 and 2008, DGBAS data showed.
“The first time marked the beginning of the dotcom crash, while the second time was the start of the global financial crisis. This indicates there is a chance the economy will slow in the near future,” Chen said
However, Chen said the situation would become more transparent in the next two months, adding that the current situation may not be as bad as those in 2001 and 2008.
Cheng Cheng-mount (鄭貞茂), chief economist at Citigroup in Taipei, said that although the unemployment rate is still low, slowing economic activity may drive it higher in the coming months.
The DGBAS tally also showed that average monthly working hours last month fell 11.5 hours to 179.9 hours from a month ago, which probably reflected the introduction of unpaid leave by some local technology companies, Chen said.
The DGBAS report showed that wages, another lagging economic gauge, rose for the 23nd consecutive month in September to an average of NT$37,013 per month, up 1.9 percent from a year ago, the highest rate since September last year.
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