The unemployment rate dropped to 3.67 percent last month, the lowest in 23 months, as fewer people lost jobs due to business downsizing or closures, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The figure might climb a little higher this month and accelerate further through the summer as graduates and part-time workers enter the job market, the agency said.
“The unemployment rate was the lowest since May 2015 at 3.62 percent, as fewer firms cut headcounts amid an improving economy,” DGBAS Deputy Director Pan Ning-hsin (潘寧馨) said.
The decline in unemployment is consistent with an upturn in the nation’s export-oriented economy as it benefits from a global technology inventory-rebuilding cycle.
DGBAS is due to update its forecast for this year’s GDP growth on Friday, with the prediction in February set at 1.92 percent.
Most research institutes domestically and abroad have raised their estimate to above 2 percent, citing stronger-than-expected exports.
The unemployment rate after seasonal adjustments was 3.78 percent, 0.06 percentage points lower than in March, affirming the market’s health.
The number of unemployed people stood at 432,000, down 13,000 from a month earlier, the DGBAS report said.
The number of people who lost jobs to business downsizing or closings dropped by 4,000, while the number of first-time job seekers fell by 3,000, report said.
The number of people who resigned to search for better positions fell by 3,000 and the number of people who lost jobs to temporary or seasonal hiring fell by 2,000.
Unemployment is highest among people with a university or higher education degree (4.53 percent), followed by people with a college education (3.95 percent) and people with a high-school education (3.68 percent).
The rate is lowest among people who finished only junior-high school (2.86 percent), the report said.
By demographic breakdown, people in the 15-to-24 age bracket had the highest unemployment rate (11.62 percent), followed by the 25-to-29 group (6.61 percent), the report said.
In related news, total monthly wages — including take-home salaries and bonuses — NT$44,144 in March, a mild increase of 0.6 percent from the same period last year, the DGBAS said in a separate report.
People in the financial and insurance sectors earned the most, with total average salaries of NT$73,431, followed by people in the electricity and gas industries with NT$72,207, the report said.
Regular take-home wages averaged NT$39,781, a 1.57 percent increase from a year earlier, it said.
For the first quarter, take-home wages rose 1.57 percent to NT$39,607 per month, the highest in the nation’s history, the report said, adding that the real-wage increase would ease to 0.79 percent after factoring in the 0.78 percent price inflation during the period.
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