The nation’s unemployment rate last month stood at 3.3 percent, marking a 0.02 percentage point fall from the previous month to the lowest in 25 years, as fewer people quit or lost their job to business downsizing or closures, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The jobless rate after seasonal adjustments was 3.37 percent, down 0.01 percentage points from December last year, it said.
“Overall indicators suggested a stable employment market in Taiwan,” Census Department Deputy Director Tan Wen-ling (譚文玲) said.
Photo: CNA
Tan said unemployment is likely to rise moderately this month due to post-holiday job transitions and a drop in temporary positions now that the Lunar New Year holiday is over.
The total number of unemployed individuals reached 396,000, down by 3,000 from one month earlier, after people who quit dropped by 2,000, the DGBAS said in a report.
The number of first-time jobseekers and job losses linked to business contractions and closures also declined by 1,000 each, it said.
By educational breakdown, people with university diplomas had the highest unemployment rate at 4.45 percent, followed by people with high-school or vocational-school education at 3.1 percent, the report said.
Those with graduate degrees had an unemployment rate of 2.7 percent, while people who had only completed junior high school or below had the lowest unemployment rate at 2.08 percent, it said.
Demographically, people aged between 20 and 24 had the highest unemployment rate of 11.14 percent, many of whom are first-time job seekers and need more time adjusting to the workforce, the report showed.
People aged between 15 and 19 had the second-highest unemployment rate of 7.94 percent, followed by the age group between 25 and 29, it said.
People older than 35 had an unemployment rate of below 2.5 percent, and the 45-to-65 age bracket consistently had the lowest jobless rate at 2.19 percent, it added.
The number of underemployed workers — those who work fewer than 35 hours a week because of economic reasons — totaled 109,000, a 15.94 percent fall from the previous month, thanks to an increase in temporary hiring, the report said.
The potential labor force — those not currently in the workforce, but willing and ready to work — stood at 138,000, shrinking by 5,000 from the preceding month, it said.
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