By Crystal Hsu / Staff reporterThe unemployment rate in Taiwan dropped to 3.73 percent last month, down 0.04 percentage points from a month earlier, as fewer people quit and more first-time jobseekers found work, the Directorate-General of Accounting, Budget and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. That explained why the unemployment rate averaged 3.74 percent for the year as of November, up 0.03 percentage points from a year earlier, the survey said. The unemployment rate was 9.46 percent for those aged 15 to 19, and eased to 6.64 percent for those aged 25 to 29 and 3.35 percent for people aged 30 to 34, it said. The average unemployment period was 23.3 weeks, shorter by 0.7 weeks from a month earlier, it said. The nation’s unemployment rate is higher than Singapore’s 2.3 percent, Japan’s 2.4 percent, Hong Kong’s 3.2 percent and South Korea’s 3.5 percent, although Taiwan has outpaced them in GDP growth so far this year, the report said.
