The nation’s unemployment rate last month edged up to 3.45 percent, rising 0.06 percentage points from one month earlier to the highest in 10 months, owing to increases in the number of first-time jobseekers and people who quit, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
However, the latest jobless data represented the lowest in 24 years for the month of July, suggesting a stable market, Census Department official Chang Yi-sui (張一穗) said.
The unemployment figures after seasonal adjustment held steady at 3.34 percent compared with one month earlier, Chang said, painting the uptick as seasonal.
Photo courtesy of the Kaohsiung Bureau of Labor Affairs.
It is common for the jobless gauge to grow 0.004 to 0.09 percentage points between June and August due to an influx of new graduates seeking work, he said.
Altogether, the number of unemployed people rose by 9,000, or 2.13 percent, to 415,000 after the number of first-time jobseekers increased by 5,000 and the number of people who quit picked up by 4,000, the DGBAS said.
At the same time, the number of people who worked for fewer than 35 hours a week increased by 14,000, the agency’s report said.
The average period of unemployment stood at 20.2 weeks, dropping by 0.6 weeks from one month earlier, the DGBAS said.
The duration was shorter for first-time jobseekers at 15.8 weeks and extended to 21.4 weeks for other groups, it said.
By educational attainment, people with a university degree had the highest unemployment rate at 4.67 percent, followed by high-school graduates at 3.26 percent, people with junior college diplomas at 2.74 percent and people with a graduate degree at 2.64 percent, the agency found.
People with junior-high school or lower education had the lowest unemployment rate at 2.09 percent, it said.
Meanwhile, people aged 20 to 24 had the highest unemployment rate at 12.13 percent, followed by the 15-to-19 age bracket at 9.12 percent, and the 25-to-29 group at 5.87 percent, the agency said.
The jobless rate moderated to 3.37 percent among people aged 30 to 34, stood at 2.71 percent for those aged 35 to 39, averaged 2.51 percent for people aged 40 to 44, and at 2.16 percent for people aged 45 and 64, the DGBAS said.
The nation’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 3.34 percent is higher than Hong Kong’s 3 percent, South Korea’s 2.5 percent and Japan’s 2.5 percent, the agency said.
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