The jobless rate for last month fell 0.06 percentage points to 4.03 percent last month from 4.09 percent in February, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The figure also improved by 0.14 percentage points from 4.17 percent in March last year, the agency said in its monthly report.
While last month's unemployment rate represented the lowest March level in four years, the seasonally adjusted figure slightly increased 0.01 percentage points to 4.06 percent from a month earlier, the report said.
There were 463,000 unemployed last month, a drop of 7,000 from February, the agency’s data showed.
“The labor market remains stable,” DGBAS Deputy Director Lo Yi-ling (羅怡玲) told a press conference.
A mild economic recovery has helped improve youth unemployment, Lo said.
The unemployment rate for the 20-to-24 age group was 13.23 percent, an improvement of 0.15 percentage points from February, but still three times the national average, with the jobless rate for 25-to-29-year-olds standing at 7.01 percent, down 0.07 percentage points month-on-month, the data showed.
The average monthly wage in the industrial and service sectors climbed to a new high of NT$37,736 in the first two months of the year, an increase of 1.27 percent from a year earlier, a DGBAS report said.
The overall average monthly wage, including bonuses and compensation, rose 6.36 percent to a new high of NT$65,028 for January and February compared with the same period last year, the report said.
After adjusting for inflation — which climbed 0.38 percent year-on-year in January and February — the real average wage, including bonuses and compensation, climbed 5.95 percent to NT$63,103, less than the NT$65,238 recorded in 1998, according to the DGBAS.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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