The unemployment rate fell to 3.91 percent last month, its lowest level in nearly six years, on the back of an economic recovery that boosted momentum in the job market, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The rate of 3.91 percent last month was an improvement by 0.12 percentage points from 4.03 percent in March and by 0.16 percentage points from 4.07 percent in April last year, the agency said in its monthly report. The figure marked the lowest level since June 2008.
It was the first time the jobless rate has fallen below 4 percent since the global financial crisis in 2008, the agency said.
The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate — a more accurate indicator of the long-term employment trend — also fell, shedding 0.02 percentage points from March to 4.04 percent last month, the report said.
“During the financial crisis [in 2008], the pace of economic recovery was slow, which made the nation’s jobless rate stay above 4 percent for quite a while,” DGBAS Deputy Director Lo Yi-ling (羅怡玲) told a press conference.
However, demand in both the public and private sectors has rebounded this year, driving the number of unemployed down by 14,000 to 449,000 last month from March, she said.
Lo said she remains cautious about the unemployment situation in the near future, as a new round of college graduates will enter the job market next month, an expected influx of about 300,000 first-time jobseekers.
However, 1111 Job Bank (1111人力銀行) public relations director Daniel Lee (李大華) said the demand for staff may remain strong in the second half of the year, mainly driven by strong orders received in the electronics sector.
The DGBAS report also said that the average monthly wage in the industrial and service sectors climbed to a record-level NT$37,808 in the first three months of the year, an increase of 1.31 percent from the previous year.
The overall average monthly wage, including bonuses and compensation, rose 5.54 percent to a new high of NT$57,582 in the first quarter, compared with the same period in the previous year, the report said.
However, the increase in the average wage was still lower than the pace of the consumer price index.
After adjusting the average for inflation — which climbed 0.8 percent year-on-year in the January-to-March period — the real average wage, including bonuses and compensation, totaled NT$55,872, which was still less than the NT$56,949 recorded during the same period in 1998, the DGBAS report said.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
RSS