The nation’s unemployment rate last month dropped to 3.8 percent, falling for the sixth consecutive month, as fewer people quit their jobs, although more people became unemployed due to business downsizing or closures, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The data represented a fractional 0.03 percentage point retreat from one month earlier as the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continued to subside, but has not disappeared altogether, the statistics agency said.
“The job market is quite stable, even though it has not fully recovered to the pre-pandemic level,” DGBAS Deputy Director Chen Hui-hsin (陳惠欣) said.
Photo: Tsai Shu-yuan, Taipei Times
The reading after seasonal adjustments stood at 3.77 percent, also lower than 3.78 percent one month earlier, affirming a slow, but steady improvement, the agency’s monthly report showed.
The hospitality sector has mostly come out of the woods judging by their staffing size from a year earlier, while construction and real-estate sectors appeared unharmed, Chen said.
The working population grew by 48,000 since the government lifted major social distancing requirements in June, allowing people to gather, shop and travel domestically, she said.
The number of unemployed people fell to 455,000, shrinking 0.66 percent from one month earlier, as the number of people who quit decreased by 3,000, the agency said, adding that the number of first-time jobseekers and people who lost seasonal jobs both fell by 1,000.
However, the number of people who lost their jobs due to business downsizing and closures gained 2,000, it said.
The average period of unemployment was 22.9 weeks, longer than 20.9 weeks one month earlier, with first-time jobseekers taking 23.5 weeks to land a position, the report found.
The number of people who had been unemployed for longer than a year dropped by 2,000 to 51,000, it said.
A breakdown of the figures by education level showed that university graduates had the highest unemployment rate at 5.57 percent, followed by high-school graduates at 3.42 percent and graduate degree holders at 2.94 percent, the report showed.
People with junior-high school education had the lowest unemployment rate at 2.66 percent.
People aged 20 to 24 had the highest unemployment rate at 12.39 percent, followed by those aged 15 to 19 at 8.77 percent, 25 to 29 at 6.42 percent, and 30 to 34 at 3.61 percent, it said.
The unemployment rate was lowest for people aged 45 to 64 at 2.25 percent.
Taiwan’s unemployment rate was higher than South Korea’s 3.7 percent and Japan’s 3 percent, but lower than Hong Kong’s 6.6 percent, the report said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”