The average annual remuneration received by employees in Taiwan last year hit a new high since the compilation of the statistics began in 1997, according to government data released yesterday.
The Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said that the average annual remuneration paid by employers in the industrial and service sectors stood at NT$675,000 (US$21,527), up 2.4 percent from a year earlier.
That included regular wages, non-regular wages, insurance and pension payments, severance pay and allowances paid by employers. Non-regular wages include overtime pay, annual bonuses and performance bonuses, the DGBAS said.
The agency said that regular wages accounted for 68.6 percent of the average remuneration last year, the lowest percentage since the data started to be compiled. Non-regular wages made up 17.4 percent of the total remuneration last year, the highest level on record in terms of ratio, the agency said.
The DGBAS said that the ratio of non-regular wages to total remuneration last year was higher than the 16.6 percent recorded in 2014, since employers appeared more generous in doling out year-end bonuses and performance bonuses before the nation’s economy started to slow down in the second half of last year.
Due to a change in the pension scheme, and a rise in labor and health insurance fees, pension and insurance payments by employers represented 13.8 percent of the total remuneration last year, up from 11.4 percent in 1977, the data showed.
Separately, the average retirement age among employees in the industrial and service sectors rose from 57.8 years in 2014 to 58.1 last year, the highest in a decade, the agency said.
The number of retirees in the two sectors for the whole of last year stood at 94,000, accounting for 4.8 percent of the total across all sectors, data showed.
Most of the retirees in the two sectors were 55 to 64, making up 56.2 percent of the total, followed by 45 to 54 (25.3 percent) and the over-65s (17.1 percent), data showed.
The average retirement age of 58.1 in the industrial and service sectors last year was the highest since 2006. When the data was first compiled, the figure stood at 55.2 years.
In 2008, the government raised the mandatory retirement age from 60 to 65, citing the nation’s aging population and fast growing number of retirees.
The DGBAS said that more than 60 percent of the employees in the industrial and service sectors were 25 to 44 and had a bachelor’s degree or higher.
The average age of the total workforce in the two sectors was 39.6 last year, compared with 39.4 in 2014, and employees had been working for an average of six years, compared with 5.9 years in 2014, it said.
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