The latest government data on wages released yesterday show firms have not raised employee pay significantly, providing more evidence of a slowing economy.
The Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) data on wages showed that workers on average earned NT$36,760 (US$1,200) in July, a 1.53 percent increase from a year earlier.
However, on a monthly basis, average wages rose just 0.28 percent from a month earlier, an indication that most companies did not insitute a large-scale pay increment plan as expected.
“Overall, we did not see employers hike salaries significantly in the middle of the year when most companies carry out pay-raise plans,” Chen Min (陳憫), a deputy director at the DGBAS, told a press conference.
Compared to small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), many large corporations have increased their employee salaries, Chen said.
In the first seven months, workers earned an average of NT$36,614, up 1.33 percent from a year earlier and slightly higher than an average of NT$36,606 during the same period in 2008, she added.
Council of Economic Planning and Development Minister Christina Liu (劉憶如) on Wednesday said there were four warning signs — slowing export orders, exports, imports and the latest IMF cutting on Taiwan’s GDP growth — for Taiwan’s economy by the end of next year.
Liu’s views provided more evidence that the nation’s economic growth may be hit by the worsening conditions in Europe and the US.
The DGBAS also released the latest unemployment data yesterday, with the jobless rate rising for the third straight month to 4.45 percent last month, up 0.04 percentage points from July, as recent graduates continued to enter the job market over the summer.
On a yearly basis, the jobless rate last month was 0.72 percentage points lower.
The number of unemployed increased by 6,000 from a month earlier to 502,000, with the number of first-time jobseekers failing to find a position rising by 7,000, the DGBAS said in a press release.
The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, a more reliable indicator of long-term trends, was down 0.01 percentage points from the previous month to 4.36 percent last month, the release said.
Although the seasonally adjusted jobless rate was better than market consensus of 4.4 percent, Tony Phoo (符銘財), a Taipei-based economist at Standard Chartered Bank, said there is rising concern in terms of hiring in the technology manufacturing and trade sectors.
The weakness in overseas markets, as well as reports of relatively poor export orders, could undermine producers’ confidence and result in delay in capital expenditure and hiring into next year, Phoo said in a note yesterday.
Phoo expects this would weight in the central bank’s rate-hiking policy decision in the meeting next Thursday by keeping the policy interest rates unchanged.
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