The unemployment rate last month edged up 0.04 percentage points to 3.78 percent, the highest in nine months, and is set to rise further this month due to the graduation season, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The lagging economic indicator after seasonal adjustments came in at 3.68 percent, a decline of 0.04 percentage points from one month earlier, and returned to the state before the beginning of the latest COVID-19 outbreak, it said.
“The increase in first-time jobseekers accounted for the rise in [last month’s] unemployment rate and would remain an unfavorable factor this month,” DGBAS Census Department Deputy Director Chen Hui-hsin (陳惠欣) said.
Photo: CNA
The headline jobless readings tend to pick up 0.05 to 0.07 percentage points between July and August in the past, and this year should prove no exception, she said.
However, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate indicated that the job market recovered from the COVID-19 outbreak after the government eased disease prevention measures, she said.
The total number of jobless people increased by 6,000 to 448,000, with first-time jobseekers contributing 8,000, the DGBAS report said, even though the number of people who quit dropped 3,000.
People who worked fewer than 35 hours per week stood at 274,000, a retreat of 19,000 from one month earlier and down 663,000 from a year earlier, it said, as the negative impact of the outbreak increasingly faded.
However, graduation season and an economic slowdown pose bigger threats, it added.
The jobless rate among college graduates topped the breakdown by educational attainment at 5.48 percent, followed by high-school graduates at 3.42 percent, graduate-degree holders at 2.8 percent, and junior-college graduates at 2.7 percent, it said.
People aged 20 to 24 constituted the largest unemployed population at 12.68 percent, followed by the 15-to-19 age bracket at 9.16 percent, the 25-to-29 demographic at 6.24 percent, and the 30-to-34 age bracket at 3.71 percent, it said.
The unemployment period last month averaged 20.4 weeks, flat from one month earlier, it said, adding that it was much shorter among first-time jobseekers at 16.9 weeks.
The number of people who were unemployed for more than a year totaled 53,000, a decrease of 3,000 from June, it said.
Taiwan’s jobless rate is lower than Hong Kong’s 4.5 percent, but higher than South Korea’s 2.9 percent and Japan’s 2.7 percent, it added.
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