The unemployment rate slid to 3.79 percent last month, the lowest in 14 years, due to a modest decrease in business closures and the number of first-time job seekers, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The jobless rate fell from 3.89 percent in November, as hotels, restaurants and retailers increased their head count to meet demand during the Christmas and New Year holidays, the statistics agency said.
“The growth momentum is likely to carry over into this month and slightly beyond,” as Taiwanese celebrate the Lunar New Year holidays from Feb. 18 to the following week, DGBAS Deputy Director Lo Yi-ling (羅怡玲) said.
The seasonally adjusted jobless rate stood at 3.84 percent last month, down from 3.87 percent in November, the agency’s report showed.
A total of 439,000 people were unemployed last month, compared with 451,000 one month earlier.
For the whole of last year, the unemployment rate averaged 3.96 percent, the lowest since 2007, when it was 3.91 percent, the DGBAS said.
That left Taiwan trailing behind its regional peers: Singapore had a jobless rate of 2 percent, Hong Kong 3.3 percent, South Korea 3.4 percent and Japan 3.5 percent.
The number of first-time job seekers decreased by 7,000 last month, while people who lost their jobs due to business closures or seasonal factors dropped by 2,000, the report said.
The number of people who quit on their own accord fell by 1,000.
Domestic demand is expected to lend greater support to economic growth this year, as savings from transportation expenses due to falling oil prices could lift disposable income and boost spending, central bank Governor Perng Fai-nan (彭淮南) said last month.
Unemployment was again highest among people with a university or higher degree at 4.99 percent, followed by college graduates at 4.35 percent and high-school graduates at 3.83 percent, the DGBAS said.
By age, the 15-to-24 category had the highest unemployment rate at 12.63 percent, compared with 4.13 percent for the 25-to-44 age group and 2.09 percent for the 45-to-64 age bracket, it said.
Meanwhile, the monthly wage averaged NT$38,279 (US$1,211) in November, an increase of 1.8 percent from a year earlier, the agency said in a separate report.
For the first 11 months of last year, the monthly wage rose to a record-high of NT$38,161, an uptick of 1.76 percent from the same period last year, the report said.
The real wage averaged NT$36,690 in November, after factoring in inflation of 1.26 percent, it said.
The wage increase could be a boon to consumer confidence and lift private consumption, economists have said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained