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Roundup: S. Korea adds 339,000 jobs in January with jobless rate at 3.7 pct

Xinhua, February 17, 2016 Adjust font size:

South Korea's economy added 339,000 jobs in January, with a jobless rate posting 3.7 percent, a government report showed Wednesday.

The number of those employed totaled 25.445 million in January, up 339,000 from a year earlier, according to Statistics Korea.

The January growth was down from a 495,000 increase in December, which marked the largest monthly advance in 16 months. But, the January figure was relatively positive compared with a 285,000 growth in November last year.

The moderation in hiring came from manufacturers, which posted a gain of 145,000 in employment in January. Hiring in the manufacturing industry topped 100,000 for 21 straight months.

Services industries showed a mixed picture. Restaurant and food retailers created 81,000 jobs last month, with real estate developers and home rents companies adding 64,000 workers. Job creation in the wholesale and retail sector declined 125,000, with the figure in the agricultural industry sliding 74,000.

Unemployment rate stood at 3.7 percent in January, down 0.1 percentage point from a year earlier. It posted the highest in six months, but it was a relative low level as the jobless rate tends to stay higher during a winter season.

Hiring rate, serving as an alternative to jobless rate, reached 58.8 percent in January, up 0.1 percentage point from a year ago. The employment rate for those aged 15-64 increased 0.4 percentage points to 65.2 percent.

The labor force participation rate was 61.1 percent in January, up 0.1 percentage point from the same month of last year.

Youth jobless rate, which gauges unemployment rate among those aged 15-29, advanced 0.3 percentage points from a year earlier to reach 9.5 percent in January. It was the highest in seven months since June 2015.

Unemployed youths in South Korea are estimated to have surpassed 1 million as companies refrain from hiring new recruits amid economic uncertainties. The introduction of legal retirement age at 60 led senior employees to keep their posts for an extended period of time.

The number of youths employed came in at 3.942 million in January, up 25,000 from a year earlier. The youth hiring rate gained 0.4 percentage points to 41.7 percent last month.

The so-called "sentiment" jobless rate among youths reached a 10-month high of 11.6 percent in January. The sentiment jobless rate was introduced in November 2014 to reflect jobless conditions more accurately.

The official unemployment rate gauges the percentage of those unemployed who actively sought jobs in the past four weeks to the sum of people employed and unemployed.

The sentiment jobless rate includes part-time workers who hope to get a regular job working more than 36 hours a week and those who want to work but reply during the job survey period that they conducted no job-searching activity in the past four weeks.

Job growth in January was led by those in their 50s and 60s, whose employments increased 115,000 and 194,000 respectively. About 10,000 workers in their 30s were employed last month, but those in their 40s faced some 4,000 job losses. Enditem