The unemployment rate last month fell to 3.67 percent, down 0.01 percentage points from one month earlier, as fewer people quit or lost work due to temporary hiring, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics said yesterday.
The reading after seasonal adjustments gained 1 percentage point to 3.73 percent, the second consecutive monthly increase, the agency said in a report.
“The latest unemployment figures suggest a stable job market and reflect an ongoing economic slowdown, if compared with the situation a year earlier,” Census Department Deputy Director Pan Ning-hsin (潘寧馨) told a media briefing.
While major economic barometers such as exports and industrial production have contracted for several months, the jobless rate has held relatively resilient, Pan said.
The total number of unemployed people fell by 1,000 to 437,000, as fewer people quit or lost jobs due to seasonal or temporary hiring, the report said, adding that there was also a decline in the number of first-time jobseekers.
It remained unclear how additional tariffs imposed by Washington on Chinese goods would affect Taiwan’s economy, which depends heavily on trade with the US and China.
The agency is to update its growth forecast tomorrow.
By education, university graduates had the highest unemployment rate at 5.02 percent, followed by high-school graduates at 3.52 percent and those with graduate degrees at 2.73 percent, the report said.
Demographically, unemployment was highest among people aged 20 to 24 at 11.7 percent, followed by those aged 15 to 19 at 8.19 percent and those aged 25 to 29 at 6.46 percent, it said.
The average unemployment period was 23.6 weeks, longer than the 22.5 weeks one month earlier, the report said.
The period stretched by two weeks to 31.6 weeks for first-time jobseekers, it said.
Taiwan’s unemployment rate is higher than Singapore’s 2.2 percent, Japan’s 2.5 percent and Hong Kong’s 2.8 percent, but is lower than South Korea’s 3.8 percent, the report said, adding that in the first four months of this year, the rate averaged 3.72 percent.
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