The unemployment rate last month dropped for a third straight month to 3.34 percent from October, remaining the lowest in 23 years and signaling that the local job market is stabilizing, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
Last month’s figure was the best since January 2001. On an annual basis, unemployment fell 0.27 percentage points. The DGBAS expects the improvement to extend into this month.
The government agency attributed the improvement last month to a pickup in hiring from the service sector during the year-end shopping season.
Photo: CNA
Local restaurants, hotels and logistics companies added 16,000 workers last month from a month earlier to 7.03 million people, or a surge of 167,000 people compared with the same period last year, DGBAS statistics showed.
However, the local manufacturing sector showed weakness in hiring amid slowing outbound demand. The number of manufacturing workers last month dropped by 15,000 to 2.99 million from November last year. It represented a sequential increase of 1,000 workers, indicating a cautious hiring strategy.
The total number of unemployed people shrank by 11,000 month-on-month to 400,000 after the number of people who quit their jobs decreased by 4,000, the DGBAS report said.
The number of first-time jobseekers who slid 3,000, it said.
University degree graduates had the highest unemployment rate at 4.55 percent, followed by high-school graduates at 3.14 percent and people with graduate degrees at 2.65 percent, the statistics showed.
Meanwhile, people aged 20 to 24 had the highest unemployment rate at 11.27 percent, as the bulk of them are first-time jobseekers or new entrants trying to adapt to the working environment. That was followed by the 15-to-19 age group at 8.45 percent and the 25-to-29 age group at 6.02 percent, the report said.
The average unemployment period was 20 weeks, down by 0.7 weeks from a month earlier with first-time jobseekers’ unemployment period reduced by 1.8 weeks to 19.1 weeks, the DGBAS said.
Taiwan’s unemployment rate was higher than Hong Kong’s 2.9 percent and South Korea’s 2.3 percent last month, statistics compiled by the DGBAS showed.
During the first 11 months, Taiwan’s unemployment rate dropped 0.19 percentage points to 3.49 percent from a year earlier. A total of 417,000 people lost their jobs during the period, down 19,000, or 4.36 percent, from the same period last year.
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