The unemployment rate last month edged down 0.01 percentage points from the previous month to 3.38 percent, the lowest figure for March in 24 years, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The figure was also 0.18 percentage points lower than a year earlier, as more first-time jobseekers landed positions and fewer people lost jobs due to the end of seasonal or temporary work, the agency said in a report.
After seasonal adjustments, the unemployment rate was flat from the previous month at 3.40 percent, also the lowest in 24 years, the report said.
Photo: CNA
To comply with the International Labor Organization’s requirement, the DGBAS also reported the unemployment rate for the past four weeks at 3.49 percent, an increase of 0.07 percentage points from a month earlier.
For the first three months of the year, the unemployment rate was 3.36 percent, down 0.17 percentage points from a year earlier, the report said.
“As career switchers continue to land jobs, the unemployment rate this month is expected to fall further,” the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) quoted DGBAS Census Department Deputy Director Chen Hui-hsin (陳惠欣) as saying yesterday.
The number of unemployed people last month fell by 1,000 sequentially to 405,000, as the number of first-time jobseekers that failed to land positions decreased by 2,000 monthly and people who lost their jobs due to the end of seasonal or temporary work also fell by 2,000, the report said.
Meanwhile, the number of people employed increased by 9,000 from the previous month to 11.581 million last month, with those in domestic services rising by 5,000 and industrial and agricultural sectors also increasing by 3,000 and 1,000 respectively, it added.
The average unemployment period last month rose slightly to 21.3 weeks, as it took first-time jobseekers 24.9 weeks to find work, while others spent 20.4 weeks to land one, the report said.
The number of people who were unemployed for more than a year grew by 2,000 from the previous month to 49,000, but dropped by 2,000 from a year earlier, it said.
Overall, the labor market stabilized, with the number of employed people standing at 11.58 million in the first three months, an increase of 96,000 from the same period of last year, while the number of unemployed people decreased by 17,000 to 403,000 over the period, the report said.
By demographic breakdown, people aged 20 to 24 had the highest unemployment rate at 11.41 percent in the first three months, followed by those aged 15 to 19 at 8.36 percent and those aged 25 to 29 at 5.82 percent, while the jobless rate for older people aged 45 to 64 was the lowest at 2.14 percent, it said.
In the first quarter, university graduates had the highest unemployment rate at 4.59 percent, followed by high-school graduates at 3.09 percent, while people with junior-high school or lower education had the lowest jobless rate of 2.7 percent, the report added.
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