Last month’s unemployment rate fell to 5.39 percent, the lowest since February last year, as jobs increased amid economic recovery, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
This compared with 5.67 percent recorded in March, with the decline of 0.28 percentage points making it the largest monthly contraction since October 1994, the statistics agency said. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate edged down for the eighth straight month to 5.43 percent from 5.64 percent recorded in the previous month, the lowest in 15 months, DGBAS data showed.
Attributing the decline to robust economic recovery, DGBAS Deputy Director Liu Tian-syh (劉天賜) said the number of people employed reached 10,414,000 last month, an increase of 30,000 people, or 0.29 percent, from a month ago.
“In particular, 25,000 jobs were added to the manufacturing sector and 11,000 jobs to the construction industry,” Liu told a media briefing, adding that the number of payrolls last month climbed 188,000, or 1.84 percent year-on-year.
“Had it not been for the government’s employment incentive programs, last month’s jobless rate would have reached 5.78 percent,” Liu said. “Some 85,000 jobs in public service have been created by the programs since October 2008.”
DGBAS data showed that 129,000 middle-aged people were unemployed last month, down 10,000 from March. Long-term unemployment also contracted to 114,000 people, down 1,000 from March.
However, Liu said the number of people employed last month was lower than the pre-crisis level of 10,460,000 in August 2008, when the global financial crunch broke. Cheng Cheng-mount (鄭貞茂), chief economist at Citigroup Taiwan Inc, said by telephone that unemployment had yet to return to levels seen prior to the financial crisis, which he said was about 4 percent.
“The pace of unemployment decline will slow toward the end of this year given uncertainty on growth in export orders [because of Europe’s debt crisis],” Cheng said, adding that the labor force in the manufacturing sector has been saturated.
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