S.Korea's youth unemployment rate posts 11.8 pct in March

Unemployment rate among South Korean youths posted 11.8 percent in March, hitting a higher rate than any figures tallied in the month when college graduates rushed to seek a job, a government report showed Friday.

Youth jobless rate for those under 30 was 11.8 percent in March, up 1.1 percentage points from a year earlier, according to Statistics Korea. It almost tripled the overall unemployment rate of 4.3 percent in the month.

The youth unemployment rate in March improved compared with an all-time high of 12.5 percent tallied in February, but it was higher than any figures recorded in March in the past.

Relatively higher youth jobless rates in February and March came as college graduates rushed to find a job in those months and civil service exams were held.

An official unemployment rate gauges the percentage of those unemployed who actively sought jobs in the past four weeks to the sum of those employed and unemployed. The more youths enter the labor market, the higher the unemployment rate gets.

The employment rate among youths was 41.0 percent in March, up 1.0 percentage point from a year earlier. It indicated an increase in job creation for youths despite the higher unemployment rate caused by a rise in the number of those who rush to the labor market.

The hiring rate gauges the percentage of working people to the working-age population, or those above 15. It is used as an alternative to jobless rate, and the government sets a target at 70 percent in the long term.

The so-called sentiment jobless rate, which the statistical agency began to unveil in November 2014, was 11.7 percent last month.

The sentiment rate, which measures the potentially unemployed, 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 that they conducted no job-searching efforts in the past four weeks. Enditem