Unemployment fell to 6.04 percent last month from 6.13 percent a month earlier, as job cuts slowed and the number of first-time job seekers dropped, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
However, the index after seasonal adjustment — used to track long-term trends in the job market — hit a new high of 6.09 percent, indicating that the economy is recovering at a snail’s pace, the report showed.
Liu Tian-shy (劉天賜), deputy director of the DGBAS’ census bureau, said the jobless rate shed 0.09 percentage points last month as job losses resulting from business closures or downsizing dipped by 11,000 and first-time job seekers fell by 6,000.
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“Unemployment is likely to have peaked in August and will show gradual but steady improvement in coming months,” Liu told a media briefing.
Industrial overtime, a leading economic indicator, gained for the second straight month to 7.4 hours in August, from 6.7 hours in July, to meet rising demand, Liu said.
The number of jobless people reached 661,000, the report said. Including their dependents, that means a total of 1.39 million people affected, it said.
PHOTO: CNA
Unemployment would have risen another 0.33 percentage points had the government not added 73,000 contract workers under job creation programs, the report said.
Approximately 58,000 people worked less than 16 hours a week, dropping 21,000 from a month earlier, the report indicated.
Cheng Cheng-mount (鄭貞茂), head economist at Citigroup Taiwan Inc, said he expected the jobless figure to hover around 6 percent for the rest of the year.
“It will be difficult for the [seasonally adjusted jobless] figure to drop below 5.9 percent this year,” Cheng said by telephone.
People with a college degree or higher continued to see the highest unemployment among education demographics at 6.46 percent, followed by job-seekers with high school education at 6.37 percent.
Standard Chartered Bank chief economist Tony Phoo (符銘財) said employers would wait before launching expansion plans, despite a better economic outlook.
“There’s a long way to go for the job market to recover to pre-recession levels,” Phoo said on the phone.
Salaries continued to erode, with regular take-home wages averaging NT$35,879 a month in August — a drop of 1.88 percent from the same period last year, the report said.
Liu said the contraction had narrowed to below 2 percent for three months.
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