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What’s Wrong with Taiwan’s Economy? Impact of Globalization 43
Table 4 presents the output growth of domestic
industries. After 2001, the economic growth was actually
sustained by manufacturing industries. However,
starting from the third quarter of 2008, manufacturing
industries failed to grow, with the rate of growth dropping
significantly from 10 percent to only 0.03 percent.
Most service industries registered a negative growth.
Those which did not were health and social welfare
services, education service, and professional, science
and technology services.
The slow growth in production was also reflected
on the reduction of employment and a surge in unemployment.
Table 5 shows changes in employment by
various industries. In September and October of 2008,
most industries experienced an across-the-broad reduction
in employment. Notable exceptions are professional,
science and technology services and health and
social work services, which have a positive change of 5
to 6 percent.
Low employment generated high unemployment.
After July of 2008, unemployment surpassed 4 percent
and kept going up until it hit 5.03 percent in December
with an average duration of joblessness lasting 26.19
weeks. The broadly-defined unemployment rate, which
includes those who want to work but do not try to find a
job, climbed to 6.46 percent. The aggregate unemployment
rate in 2008 was 4.14 percent, up by a 0.23
percentage point over 2007. Joblessness hit older
workers hardest. Those jobless workers aged between
45 and 64 numbered 88,000 out of the total of 450,000,
an increase of 18.23 percent (13,000) over the previous
year. Another hard hit group of workers is those with
university education or higher. Unemployment rose to
4.78 percent among university graduates and those with
advanced degrees. Table 6 shows unemployment by
educational attainment and age.