The nation’s unemployment rate stood at 3.84 percent last month, a drop of 0.02 percentage points from April, as fewer people lost their jobs due to businesses downsizing or closing, and more than muting the gain in the number of people who quit their jobs, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The data marked a 0.22 percentage point increase from a year earlier due to economic weakness, with the DGBAS expecting the jobless rate to climb over the summer with the arrival of new graduates and part-time employees seeking work.
“We will closely monitor the job market, which tends to record higher unemployment rates between June and August, driven by the surge in first-time and part-time job seekers,” DGBAS deputy section head Chang Yun-yun (張雲澐) told a news conference.
The unemployment rate after seasonal adjustments stood at 3.96 percent, down from 3.97 percent in April, suggesting little change in the job market, the report showed.
For the first five months of the year, the jobless rate averaged 3.88 percent, rising for the first time in seven years, the DGBAS report showed, as exporters kept conservative hiring policies to cope with soft external demand.
Online human resources advisory firm 1111 Job Bank (1111人力銀行) painted the latest drop in unemployment as “a lull prior to a storm,” saying that only 54.2 percent of companies plan to increase their staff numbers next quarter, a sharp decline of 11 percentage points from the current quarter.
“The fall in hiring interest bucks the advent of high sales season for technology products and might spell trouble for the job market,” 1111 Job Bank vice president Daniel Lee (李大華) said.
Firms that plan to increase their staff are mostly involved in retail or are service-oriented, Lee said.
The number of unemployed people stood at 449,000, a decline of 2,000 from April, as the number of first-time job seekers dropped by 2,000 and the number of people who lost their jobs due to seasonal factors dropped by 1,000, the report said. However, the number of people who quit their jobs increased by 1,000.
The unemployment rate was highest for the 15-to-24 age bracket at 11.42 percent, followed by the 25-to-44 age bracket at 4.04 percent, the report said. People aged 45 to 64 had the lowest jobless rate of 2.18 percent, the report showed.
Unemployment was highest among people with university degrees or higher at 4.59 percent, followed by people with college diplomas at 4.05 percent, the report showed.
The unemployment rate for people with a high-school education was 3.89 percent, while the rate for those with less than a high-school education stood at 3.14 percent, the report showed.
In related news, take-home wages averaged NT$39,241 per month in April, a 1.68 percent increase from the previous year, the DGBAS said in a separate report.
Average monthly wages, including bonuses and other compensations, totaled NT$43,560 in April, an increase of 0.5 percent from a year earlier, the report showed.
For the first four months of the year, take-home wages rose to a record NT$39,057 per month, while average salaries shrank 1.16 percent to NT$55,576 due to lower bonuses and performance compensations, the report said.
Real take-home wages fell 0.2 percent year-on-year during the same period, while real average salaries declined 2.88 percent after factoring in the 1.77 percent inflation, the report said.
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