The unemployment rate last month eased to 3.66 percent, the lowest since 2001, as the job market recovered further after a COVID-19 outbreak in May, although there is still room for improvement, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
Last month’s figure was 0.17 percentage points lower than a month earlier, marking a fifth straight month of decline, DGBAS Deputy Director Chen Hui-hsin (陳惠欣) told a news conference in Taipei.
The unemployment rate is expected to decline again this month as retailers are hiring temporary staff to cash in on the holiday season, she said.
Photo: CNA
“Unemployment data nearly dropped to the level prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, but a considerable number of people are still working fewer hours,” Chen said.
The number of people who worked fewer than 35 hours per week stood at 229,000, 30,000 more than in previous Novembers, although the figure dropped by 64,000 from October, she said.
The jobless rate after seasonal adjustments stood at 3.71 percent, a decrease of 0.13 percentage points from a month earlier, the DGBAS said in a report.
The number of unemployed people totaled 436,000, a 4.38 percent decline, as people who lost jobs due to business downsizing and closures fell by 8,000, it said.
Meanwhile, the number of first-time jobseekers and people who quit their jobs both dropped by 4,000, it added.
By measure of the employed population, there were 47,000 fewer jobs available than before a level 3 virus alert was introduced in May, Chen said.
University graduates had the highest unemployment rate at 5.14 percent, followed by high-school graduates at 3.48 percent and people who completed junior high at 2.68 percent, the report found.
The unemployment rate for people with graduate degrees was 2.63 percent, the DGBAS said.
Demographically, people aged 20 to 24 had the highest unemployment rate at 12.19 percent, followed by people aged 15 to 19 at 8.62 percent and those aged 25 to 29 at 6.23 percent, it said.
The unemployment rate for people aged 30 to 39 was between 2.8 percent and 3.57 percent, while for people aged 45 to 64, it was 2.2 percent, the lowest, the DGBAS said.
However, the period of unemployment increased to an average of 20.4 weeks for all people and 23.3 weeks for first-time jobseekers, it said.
Taiwan’s headline unemployment rate is lower than Hong Kong’s 4.1 percent, but higher than Japan’s 2.7 percent and South Korea’s 2.6 percent, the DGBAS said.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS