The nation’s unemployment rate rose to 3.71 percent last month, ending four consecutive months of declines, as new graduates started entering the job market, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
A mild increase is common between May and August, when the jobless rate tends to gain 0.2 to 0.4 percentage points due to the influx of first-time and summer jobseekers, the agency said.
The latest unemployment data suggest that the local job market remains healthy, DGBAS senior executive officer Hou Mei-ling (侯美鈴) said, as the reading is 0.21 percentage points lower than a year earlier.
The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate stood at 3.76 percent, compared with 3.75 percent in May and 3.97 percent a year earlier, the DGBAS said, affirming stable headcounts among companies across sectors despite the economic slowdown.
Last month, the jobless population stood at 431,000, an increase of 11,000 from May, the agency said.
The number of people who quit or lost their jobs owing to seasonal factors grew by 2,000 and 1,000 respectively, while those who lost their jobs because of business closures or downsizing dropped by 1,000, the agency said.
While unemployment is a lagging economic indicator, a low unemployment ratio could continue to lend support to private consumption, as a stalling global economy is sapping exports, it said.
A breakdown by education shows that unemployment was highest among people with a university degree or higher at 4.66 percent, followed by college graduates at 4.01 percent and high-school graduates at 3.85 percent, according to the agency’s tallies.
By age group, unemployment was highest among people aged 15 to 24 at 11.75 percent, compared with 3.9 percent for the 25-to-44 age group and 1.96 percent for the 45-to-64 bracket, data showed.
In a separate report, the DGBAS said that the average monthly wage rose 1.39 percent year-on-year to NT$38,637 (US$1,232) in May.
Adding in non-regular compensation, the average monthly wage rose to NT$43,845 in May, down 1.43 percent from a year earlier, the report showed.
For the first five months of the year, take-home pay grew 1.51 percent year-on-year to NT$38,490, the agency said, adding that average wages rose 3.54 percent year-on-year after factoring in deflation and bonuses.
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