Unemployment eased slightly to a seven-year low last month, as companies kept headcount steady and fewer people felt discontented with their existing job, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The latest headline jobless rate stood at 3.95 percent last month, down 0.01 percentage points from September and 0.29 percentage points from the previous year, as local manufacturers continued to benefit from an improving economy in the US, the main consumer market for Taiwanese electronic devices and components.
The job market appears healthy and stable ahead, with the unemployment reading likely to drop further, but at a mild pace, now that seasonal disruptions linked with the summer vacation have faded away, DGBAS Deputy Director Lo Yi-ling (羅怡玲) told a press briefing.
“The modest economic recovery will limit improvement in the job market,” Lo told reporters.
The seasonally adjusted jobless reading registered 3.87 percent last month, down 0.03 percentage points from the previous month, affirming the health of the local job market after removing short-term volatile noise, the DGBAS said.
The number of jobless people last month was 457,000, a decrease of 1,000 from the previous month, the DGBAS said. The total number of people employed last month was 11.12 million, up 21,000 from September, it said.
In the absence of any surprises, the unemployment rate may drop below the 4 percent mark for the full year for the first time since the global financial crisis struck in 2008, Lo said.
The number of people who lost their jobs to downsizing or closure decreased by 2,000 last month, while the number of first-time jobseekers fell by 1,000, the statistics agency said.
The number of people who lost seasonal or temporary jobs increased by 2,000, it added.
People with university or higher education had the highest jobless rate at 5.15 percent, followed by college graduates at 4.45 percent and high-school graduates at 3.75 percent, the DGBAS report found.
By demographic breakdown, people aged 15 to 24 had the highest unemployment rate at 13.02 percent, much higher than the 25 to 44 age group at 4.08 percent and the 45 to 64 age group at 2.04 percent, the monthly report said.
Last month, unemployment averaged 25.5 weeks, 0.4 weeks longer than the previous month, the report said.
In related news, workers earned an average of NT$44,382 (US$1,431.25) a month in September, up 2.19 percent from the same period last year, though take-home wages stood at NT$38,384 a month, the DGBAS said in a separate report.
The former figure includes year-end and mid-year bonuses.
For the first nine months, average headline wages rose to a record high of NT$48,521 a month, translating into a gain of 4.37 percent from the same period last year, the report said, adding that the real increase was 3.02 percent after factoring in inflation.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS