The unemployment rate climbed to 4.25 percent last month, from 4.18 percent in January, as companies shed temporary staffers after the Lunar New Year holiday, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
“The number of people who lost seasonal or temporary jobs rose by 6,000 last month and another 4,000 quit after the holiday,” which drove the unemployment rate higher, Chen Min (陳憫), a deputy director at the statistics agency, told a news conference.
The latest data showed that the number of unemployed totaled 479,000 last month, an increase of 7,000 from one month earlier, while the job pool shrank by 18,000, the DGBAS said in a report.
The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, a better indicator of the long-term trend as it excludes seasonal factors, eased 0.44 percentage points from February last year to 4.15 percent, the report said.
The average unemployment rate for the first two months edged down 0.45 percentage points, the report added.
Compared with its peers in the region, Taiwan was the worst performer, with South Korea reporting a jobless rate of 3.7 percent, Hong Kong 3.4 percent and Singapore 2 percent, the report showed.
People aged 24 and younger topped the jobless population at 12.08 percent, followed by those aged 25 to 44 at 4.41 percent, while those with a college education or higher had the biggest difficulty finding work at 5.24 percent, DGBAS statistics showed.
The domestic job market could improve from next quarter as major companies have announced plans to increase their headcount as the eurozone makes slow but steady progress in reining in its fiscal debt and the US recovery remains on track, online job matchmaker 1111 Job Bank (1111人力銀行) said.
The demand for labor will mostly come from large corporations, as small and medium-sized firms remain cautious ahead of clearer signs of an economic pickup, 1111 Job Bank public relations director Henry Ho (何啟聖) said.
The anticipated headcount expansion is unlikely to bring an end to stagnant wages, with companies offering an average monthly wage of NT$31,730, Ho said.
The amount is lower than the national average of NT$37.064 recorded in January.
That would mean a 1.42 percent decline in real wages after adjustments for inflation, which gained 2.37 percent during the same period, the report said.
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