The number of employees in the industrial and service sectors in August was up 0.36 percent month-on-month, as the job market began recovering from a local COVID-19 outbreak, but it has yet to fully recover, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The data showed the addition of about 30,000 jobs in August that raised the overall number of employees to 8.09 million, as businesses in the service sector resumed normal operations, DGBAS Deputy Director Chen Hui-hsin (陳惠欣) told a news conference in Taipei.
Lower numbers of local COVID-19 infections enabled hospitality, recreational and non-school educational facilities to reopen their businesses at reduced capacity, Chen said.
Photo: Clare Cheng, Taipei Times
“The situation is improving, though still lagging behind what it was prior to the implementation of the level 3 COVID-19 alert in May,” she said.
Hotels and restaurants added about 13,000 more employees to their payrolls, while non-school educational, social welfare and health-related facilities each hired about 4,000 more workers, she added.
The accession rate — the number of new employees added to payrolls — picked up 0.24 percentage points to 3.04 percent, while the exit rate edged up 0.41 percentage points to 2.68 percent, the report showed.
The government has maintained some restrictions, such as keeping night clubs, dance halls and entertainment venues where people cannot maintain social distancing closed, despite only two local infections being reported this month.
Meanwhile, an uptick in wages also lent support to a recovery in the job market.
The nation’s average take-home pay grew 0.76 percent to NT$43,227 (US$1,536) in August, the report showed.
The pace of the increase is the fastest since 2008, Chen said, after hotels and restaurants raised employees’ compensation by 5.42 percent, leisure and entertainment businesses hiked wages by 5 percent, and other service providers raised wages by 3.31 percent on average.
However, total monthly wages including overtime and commission-based income declined 7.58 percent month-on-month to NT$51,169 in August after electronic component suppliers issued mid-year bonuses in July, pushing up the comparison base, the report showed.
Manufacturers of notebook computers and optical devices chose to pay mid-year bonuses in August, increasing their employees’ monthly wages by 19.06 percent, it showed.
In the first eight months of the year, average take-home pay in the nation increased 1.78 percent year-on-year to NT$42,990, while total compensation grew 2.41 percent to NT$57,579, the report showed.
The real gain in total wages stood at 0.15 percent after factoring in inflation, it showed.
RECYCLE: Taiwan would aid manufacturers in refining rare earths from discarded appliances, which would fit the nation’s circular economy goals, minister Kung said Taiwan would work with the US and Japan on a proposed cooperation initiative in response to Beijing’s newly announced rare earth export curbs, Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said yesterday. China last week announced new restrictions requiring companies to obtain export licenses if their products contain more than 0.1 percent of Chinese-origin rare earths by value. US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent on Wednesday responded by saying that Beijing was “unreliable” in its rare earths exports, adding that the US would “neither be commanded, nor controlled” by China, several media outlets reported. Japanese Minister of Finance Katsunobu Kato yesterday also
Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), founder and CEO of US-based artificial intelligence chip designer Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) on Friday celebrated the first Nvidia Blackwell wafer produced on US soil. Huang visited TSMC’s advanced wafer fab in the US state of Arizona and joined the Taiwanese chipmaker’s executives to witness the efforts to “build the infrastructure that powers the world’s AI factories, right here in America,” Nvidia said in a statement. At the event, Huang joined Y.L. Wang (王英郎), vice president of operations at TSMC, in signing their names on the Blackwell wafer to
‘DRAMATIC AND POSITIVE’: AI growth would be better than it previously forecast and would stay robust even if the Chinese market became inaccessible for customers, it said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its full-year revenue growth outlook after posting record profit for last quarter, despite growing market concern about an artificial intelligence (AI) bubble. The company said it expects revenue to expand about 35 percent year-on-year, driven mainly by faster-than-expected demand for leading-edge chips for AI applications. The world’s biggest contract chipmaker in July projected that revenue this year would expand about 30 percent in US dollar terms. The company also slightly hiked its capital expenditure for this year to US$40 billion to US$42 billion, compared with US$38 billion to US$42 billion it set previously. “AI demand actually
AI BOOST: Although Taiwan’s reliance on Chinese rare earth elements is limited, it could face indirect impacts from supply issues and price volatility, an economist said DBS Bank Ltd (星展銀行) has sharply raised its forecast for Taiwan’s economic growth this year to 5.6 percent, citing stronger-than-expected exports and investment linked to artificial intelligence (AI), as it said that the current momentum could peak soon. The acceleration of the global AI race has fueled a surge in Taiwan’s AI-related capital spending and exports of information and communications technology (ICT) products, which have been key drivers of growth this year. “We have revised our GDP forecast for Taiwan upward to 5.6 percent from 4 percent, an upgrade that mainly reflects stronger-than-expected AI-related exports and investment in the third
RSS