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.
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
ELECTRONICS BOOST: A predicted surge in exports would likely be driven by ICT products, exports of which have soared 84.7 percent from a year earlier, DBS said DBS Bank Ltd (星展銀行) yesterday raised its GDP growth forecast for Taiwan this year to 4 percent from 3 percent, citing robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI)-related exports and accelerated shipment activity, which are expected to offset potential headwinds from US tariffs. “Our GDP growth forecast for 2025 is revised up to 4 percent from 3 percent to reflect front-loaded exports and strong AI demand,” Singapore-based DBS senior economist Ma Tieying (馬鐵英) said in an online briefing. Taiwan’s second-quarter performance beat expectations, with GDP growth likely surpassing 5 percent, driven by a 34.1 percent year-on-year increase in exports, Ma said, citing government
UNIFYING OPPOSITION: Numerous companies have registered complaints over the potential levies, bringing together rival automakers in voicing their reservations US President Donald Trump is readying plans for industry-specific tariffs to kick in alongside his country-by-country duties in two weeks, ramping up his push to reshape the US’ standing in the global trading system by penalizing purchases from abroad. Administration officials could release details of Trump’s planned 50 percent duty on copper in the days before they are set to take effect on Friday next week, a person familiar with the matter said. That is the same date Trump’s “reciprocal” levies on products from more than 100 nations are slated to begin. Trump on Tuesday said that he is likely to impose tariffs
HELPING HAND: Approving the sale of H20s could give China the edge it needs to capture market share and become the global standard, a US representative said The US President Donald Trump administration’s decision allowing Nvidia Corp to resume shipments of its H20 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China risks bolstering Beijing’s military capabilities and expanding its capacity to compete with the US, the head of the US House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party said. “The H20, which is a cost-effective and powerful AI inference chip, far surpasses China’s indigenous capability and would therefore provide a substantial increase to China’s AI development,” committee chairman John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, said on Friday in a letter to US Secretary of