The unemployment rate last month declined to 4.53 percent, from 4.8 percent a month earlier, as fewer people lost jobs to business downsizing and closures, despite an increase in the number of first-time jobseekers, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The agency attributed the decline in unemployment to a stabilization in the number of COVID-19 cases, which allowed restaurants and retailers to regain partial momentum.
However, the unemployment rate for the month of July was the highest it had been in the past 11 years, as the negative impact of the virus outbreak lingered, the DGBAS said.
Photo: Huang Liang-chieh, Taipei Times
The unemployment rate after seasonal adjustments shed 0.4 percentage points to 4.36 percent, affirming a downward trend, it said.
“Two major factors — the graduation season and improvement in virus controls — will set the trajectory for jobless rates this month, as the former will push up the reading and the latter will tame unemployment,” DGBAS Deputy Director Chen Hui-hsin (陳惠欣) told a news conference in Taipei.
The working population increased by 63,000 to 11.36 million, while the unemployed population shrank by 31,000 to 539,000, the DGBAS report showed.
The service sector contributed more than 50,000 new jobs and the industrial sector added about 11,000, it said.
Meanwhile, 937,000 people worked fewer than 35 hours a week last month, down 47,000 from June, as affected businesses seek to make do by reducing working hours, the report said.
The number of first-time jobseekers grew by 7,000 from a month earlier, it found.
The number of unemployed people increased by 60,000 from a year earlier, indicating that COVID-19 hit the job market harder this year, the report said.
People need to spend longer hunting for jobs these days, with the average unemployment period being 18.3 weeks, compared with 16.5 weeks in June, the report said, adding that the number of people who were unemployed for a year or longer increased by 8,000 to 49,000.
By education breakdown, university graduates had the highest unemployment rate of 5.86 percent, followed by high-school graduates at 4.6 percent and junior-high school graduates at 3.8 percent, it said.
Younger people had the highest rate of unemployment at 13.87 percent for those aged 20 to 24, followed by 15-to-19-year-olds at 9.26 percent and 25-to-29-year-olds at 7.12 percent, the report said.
The unemployment rate for people aged 30 to 34 was 4.15 percent and declined to 3.31 percent for people aged 35 to 39, it said.
People aged 40 to 64 had unemployment rates of 3.18 percent to 3.19 percent.
Taiwan’s unemployment rate is lower than Kong Kong’s 5.2 percent, but higher than South Korea’s 3.2 percent and Japan’s 3 percent, although South Korea and Japan had much worse COVID-19 outbreaks, the DGBAS said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained