The unemployment rate in Taiwan dropped to 3.73 percent last month, down 0.04 percentage points from a month earlier, as fewer people quit and more first-time jobseekers found work, the Directorate-General of Accounting, Budget and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The reading after seasonal adjustments gained 1 percentage point to 3.73 percent, the agency said.
“The local job market is stable” based on the latest employment data, Census Department Deputy Director Pan Ning-hsin (潘寧馨) told a media briefing.
The unemployed population declined by 4,000 to 447,000, with the number of first-time jobseekers shrinking by 4,000 and the number of people who quit falling by 1,000, the DGBAS’ monthly survey showed.
However, the number of people who lost work to temporary or seasonal hiring increased by 2,000, it showed.
Compared with a year earlier, the number of people without a job rose 6,000, attributable to an ongoing economic slowdown that began in the second half of last year and has yet to end, it said.
That explained why the unemployment rate averaged 3.74 percent for the year as of November, up 0.03 percentage points from a year earlier, the survey said.
The addition of 68,000 jobs in the first 11 months of this year was the lowest in a decade, meriting close attention, the agency said, adding that the low birthrate has started to affect the market.
Additionally, unemployment was highest among people aged 20 to 24 at 12.55 percent, “as many of them are first-time jobseekers and need more time to transition from school to the real world,” it said.
The unemployment rate was 9.46 percent for those aged 15 to 19, and eased to 6.64 percent for those aged 25 to 29 and 3.35 percent for people aged 30 to 34, it said.
By education, university graduates had the highest unemployment rate among first-time jobseekers last month at 5.42 percent, followed by high-school graduates at 3.46 percent and those with graduate degrees at 3.08 percent, the survey showed.
The average unemployment period was 23.3 weeks, shorter by 0.7 weeks from a month earlier, it said.
The number of people who have been jobless for more than a year was 61,000, a drop of 3,000 from October, it said.
The nation’s unemployment rate is higher than Singapore’s 2.3 percent, Japan’s 2.4 percent, Hong Kong’s 3.2 percent and South Korea’s 3.5 percent, although Taiwan has outpaced them in GDP growth so far this year, the report said.
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