The unemployment rate dropped to 3.87 percent last month, down 0.08 percentage points from October, as companies in the service sector increased headcount to meet rising business demand ahead of the holidays this month and next month, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The trend might be sustained into the Lunar New Year holiday in early February, but the dissolution of TransAsia Airways Corp (復興航空) and the downsizing at the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) could negatively affect the rate, the agency said.
“More people, especially graduates, found jobs last month as companies increased their headcounts amid the economic recovery,” DGBAS Deputy Director Pan Ning-hsin (潘寧馨) said.
Economic barometers such as exports, industrial production and the purchasing managers’ index all lent support to improving business activity.
Consequently, the number of first-time job seekers fell by 7,000 and people losing jobs to temporary hiring, business closures or downsizing dropped by 1,000, the monthly report showed.
The jobless population stood at 455,000 people, it said.
After seasonal adjustments, the unemployment rate stood at 3.84 percent, down 0.06 percentage points from the previous month, it said.
The latest jobless rate was lower than the same period last year, as the economy makes a steady recovery, it said.
In the first 11 months of this year, the average unemployment rate stood at 3.93 percent, up 0.16 percentage points from the previous year, the agency said.
Unemployment was highest among people who have university degrees or higher at 4.8 percent, followed by people with college diplomas at 4.17 percent, it added.
The rate stood at 3.88 percent for people with high-school diplomas and at 2.98 percent for people with at most a junior-high education, it said.
By demographic breakdown, the unemployment rate was highest for people aged 15 to 24 at 12.31 percent, followed by those 25 to 29 at 6.67 percent, the agency said.
The average jobless rates stood at 4.02 percent for people aged between 25 and 44 and at 2.05 percent for those 45 to 64, it said.
Meanwhile, monthly take-home wages averaged NT$39,362 (US$1,228.91) in October, an increase of 1.08 percent from a year earlier, the agency said in a separate report.
The average monthly wage, including bonuses and other compensation, was NT$43,069 in October, an increase of 0.42 percent from a year earlier, the report said.
In the first 10 months of the year, take-home wages rose 1.3 percent to an average of NT$39,167 per month, while the average salary rose 0.26 percent to NT$49,392, it 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
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