The nation’s jobless rate rose to 4.02 percent last month, as fresh graduates and an economic slowdown raised the gauge to the highest level in about two years, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The figures represent a new high since August 2014 after gaining 0.1 percentage points from 3.92 percent in June and picked up 0.2 percentage points from a year earlier, the agency said.
“The soft economy has weighed on the job market since the second half of last year, but the situation did not deteriorate much last month,” DGBAS senior executive officer Pan Ning-hsin (潘寧馨) said, adding that the jobless rate after seasonal adjustments stood unchanged at 3.96 percent.
The unemployed population increased by 13,000 people to 472,000 people last month from a month earlier, with 12,000 first-time job seekers and 1,000 people who lost their seasonal or temporary jobs, the report said.
People who lost their jobs due to businesses downsizing and those who resigned both dropped by 1,000, it added.
For the first seven months of this year, the unemployment rate averaged at 3.91 percent, according to the report.
A lagging economic barometer, the job market has yet to benefit from the sluggish recovery, though exports, industrial output and other indicators have returned to positive territory.
Unemployment was highest among people who have university degrees or higher at 5 percent, followed by people with college diplomas at 4.35 percent, the report showed.
The jobless rate stood at 3.98 percent for people with high-school education and at 3.15 percent for people with junior-high school or lower education, it said.
By demographic breakdown, people in the 15-to-24 age bracket had the highest unemployment rate at 12.45 percent, followed by the 25-to-44 group at 4.1 percent, the report said.
People aged between 45 and 64 had the lowest unemployment rate at 2.3 percent.
Monthly take-home wages averaged NT$39,151 in June, an increase of 0.82 percent from the previous year, the DGBAS said in a separate report.
Average monthly wages, including bonuses and other compensations, was NT$44,998 in June, an increase of 0.94 percent from a year earlier, the report showed.
For the first six months of the year, take-home wages rose 1.45 percent to NT$39,106 per month, while average salaries fell 0.06 percent to NT$52,186, due to lower bonuses and performance compensations, the report said.
Inflation of 1.55 percent in the first six months of the year eroded real take-home and average wages by 0.1 percent and 1.58 percent respectively, the report said.
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