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.
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],”
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
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