Average monthly take-home wages in September rose 1.72 percent to NT$41,845 (US$1,374.9), the slowest pace of increase in 28 months, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The increase remains healthy although it is the first time the pay increase dropped lower than 2 percent since March, DGBAS Deputy Director Pan Ning-hsin (潘寧馨) told a media briefing in Taipei.
“Financial and insurance companies accounted for the slowdown and more time is needed to conclude if it is an isolated or sustained phenomenon,” Pan said.
Total monthly compensations, which include overtime pay and performance-based rewards, stood at NT$48,984, an increase of 1.83 percent from a year earlier, the DGBAS said.
Cumulatively, average take-home pay gained 2.24 percent to a 19-year high of NT$41,766 per month, while total compensations rose 1.91 percent to NT$54,946 a month, a three-year low, the agency’s report said.
The gap mainly had to do with employers generally turning conservative about distributing bonuses amid an economic slowdown, Pan said.
Real take-home pay after factoring in inflation rose 1.72 percent to NT$40,755 a month in the first nine months of the year, while real overall compensations picked up 1.39 percent to NT$53,616 per month, the report said.
Industrial sectors reported a 4.1 percent drop in monthly wages from August, greater than the 3.7 percent decline for service-oriented sectors, the report said.
The pay decline for financial and insurance companies reached 12.36 percent, and could have extended to last month and beyond after Nan Shan Life Insurance Co (南山人壽) last month incurred losses of NT$5.01 million.
It was recently fined by the Financial Supervisory Commission for information technology system flaws and the insurance industry as a whole is going to find it more difficult to sell savings-type policies following regulatory changes that are to make them more expensive next year.
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