The unemployment rate last month fell slightly to 3.67 percent, a 0.06 percentage points less than a month earlier, as fewer people quit or lost jobs due to downsizing or closures, the Directorate-General of Accounting, Budget and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
After seasonal adjustments, the rate shed 1 percentage point to 3.72 percent, affirming a stable job market, Census Department Deputy Director Pan Ning-hsin (潘寧馨) told a media briefing.
The rate last month weakened from 0.04 to 0.12 percentage points for the past decade, and last year proved no exception, thanks to an increase in seasonal and temporary hiring before the year-end, Pan said.
For the whole of last year, the jobless rate stood at 3.73 percent, up 0.02 percentage points from a year earlier, as many local firms were affected by a US-China trade dispute, the effects of which began to show in the second half of 2018, Pan said.
Last month’s data suggested a jobless population of 439,000, a decline of 8,000 people from one month earlier, DGBAS said.
The number of first-time jobseekers shrank by 5,000, while the number of people who lost jobs to business downsizing or at the end of temporary hiring fell by 2,000 each, the agency’s monthly survey found.
As usual, restaurants and hospitality facilities added the most employees this time of the year to meet demand for corporate banquets and holiday celebrations, it said.
Unemployment was highest among people aged 20 to 24 (12.27 percent), followed by 15-to-19 (9.22 percent) and 25-to-29 (6.57 percent), it said.
By education level, university graduates had the highest unemployment rate at 5.3 percent, followed by high-school graduates at 3.51 percent and people with graduate degrees at 2.93 percent, the survey showed.
The average unemployment period was 24.4 weeks, 1.1 week longer than a month earlier, it said, adding that the duration extended by 1.5 weeks to 24.3 weeks for first-time jobseekers.
The number of people unemployed for longer than a year rose by 2,000 to 63,000, it said.
Taiwan’s unemployment rate is higher than that of South Korea (3.6 percent), Hong Kong (3.2 percent), Singapore (2.3 percent) and Japan (2.2 percent), but the nation beat them on GDP growth, it said.
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