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.
TECH BOOST: New TSMC wafer fabs in Arizona are to dramatically improve US advanced chip production, a report by market research firm TrendForce said With Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) pouring large funds into Arizona, the US is expected to see an improvement in its status to become the second-largest maker of advanced semiconductors in 2027, Taipei-based market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said in a report last week. TrendForce estimates the US would account for a 21 percent share in the global advanced integrated circuit (IC) production market by 2027, sharply up from the current 9 percent, as TSMC is investing US$65 billion to build three wafer fabs in Arizona, the report said. TrendForce defined the advanced chipmaking processes as the 7-nanometer process or more
China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) plans to start mass-producing its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip in the first quarter of next year, even as it struggles to make enough chips due to US restrictions, two people familiar with the matter said. The telecoms conglomerate has sent samples of the Ascend 910C — its newest chip, meant to rival those made by US chipmaker Nvidia Corp — to some technology firms and started taking orders, the sources told Reuters. The 910C is being made by top Chinese contract chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) on its N+2 process, but a lack
Who would not want a social media audience that grows without new content? During the three years she paused production of her short do-it-yourself (DIY) farmer’s lifestyle videos, Chinese vlogger Li Ziqi (李子柒), 34, has seen her YouTube subscribers increase to 20.2 million from about 14 million. While YouTube is banned in China, her fan base there — although not the size of YouTube’s MrBeast, who has 330 million subscribers — is close to 100 million across the country’s social media platforms Douyin (抖音), Sina Weibo (新浪微博) and Xiaohongshu (小紅書). When Li finally released new videos last week — ending what has
OPEN SCIENCE: International collaboration on math and science will persevere even if the incoming Trump administration imposes strict controls, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said on Saturday that global cooperation in technology would continue even if the incoming US administration imposes stricter export controls on advanced computing products. US president-elect Donald Trump, in his first term in office, imposed restrictions on the sale of US technology to China citing national security — a policy continued under US President Joe Biden. The curbs forced Nvidia, the world’s leading maker of chips used for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, to change its product lineup in China. The US chipmaking giant last week reported record-high quarterly revenue on the back of strong AI chip
RSS