The nation’s unemployment rate dropped to 3.63 percent last month, the lowest in 15 years for April, as companies increased headcounts and people dissatisfied with earlier jobs rejoined the labor force after receiving their lunar year-end bonuses, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The latest jobless figure marked a 0.28 percentage point decline from a year earlier and a 0.09 percentage point decline from March, the DGBAS said in a report, adding that unemployment after seasonal adjustments stood unchanged at 3.75 percent.
“A lagging economic indicator, the jobless rate has yet to reflect an ongoing economic slowdown indicated by disappointing export data,” DGBAS Deputy Director Lo Yi-ling (羅怡玲) said.
In addition, domestic demand — namely, private consumption and investment — is expected to underpin GDP growth this year, thanks to energy cost savings from cheaper oil prices, the statistics agency said.
The jobless rate might drop further this month from April, and edge up between next month and August due to an expected increase of first-time and part-time jobseekers over the summer vacation, Lo said.
The number of unemployed was 421,000 last month, down by 10,000 from a month earlier, the report said.
The number of people who quit their jobs increased by 4,000 last month, while people who lost their jobs due to business closures or seasonal factors increased by 2,000, the report said.
First-time jobseekers also decreased by 2,000 last month.
By education breakdown, unemployment was highest among people with a university degree or higher at 4.54 percent, followed by college graduates at 3.91 percent and high-school graduates at 3.79 percent, the report said.
The 15-to-24 age group had the highest unemployment rate at 11.48 percent, compared with 3.83 percent for the 25-to-44 group and 1.9 percent for the 45-to-64 bracket, the report said.
Well-educated young jobseekers continue to top the jobless population despite a record high of job openings listed on online job banks.
Online recruitment agency 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said the number of job openings on its Web site reached a record high of 650,000 and many employers would allow college graduate candidates to start working in July.
The job bank advised would-be jobseekers to take action now rather than one month later, when competition is set to intensify.
Regular monthly wages averaged NT$38,522 in March, up 1.51 percent from a year earlier, the DGBAS said in a separate report.
Non-regular monthly wages averaged NT$43,016 in March, an increase of 0.72 percent from a year earlier, the report said.
In the first quarter, take-home wages gained 1.58 percent year-on-year to NT$38,406, a record high, the DGBAS said, adding that the figures would mark a 2.19 percent gain after adjustment for deflation.
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
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts