Anchor: New figures show that the country’s jobless rate edged up in December due to seasonal factors, despite efforts to bolster employment. In particular, the youth unemployment rate logged a record high at nine-point-nine percent.
Our Park Jong-hong has the details.

Report: Jobseekers struggled to find jobs with little success last year.

Sobering figures show that the overall unemployment rate stood at three-point-seven percent, which translates into one-million-28 thousand people out of a job, the highest since the year 2000.

What’s more, Statistics Korea said Wednesday that the number of new hires in the manufacturing sector edged down.

Such figures suggest that, in general, decent and desirable jobs were harder to come by in South Korea, which is Asia’s fourth largest economy.

The jobless rate for young people, aged between 15 and 29, was a whopping nine-point-nine percent for 2017, marking the worst figure since the government started compiling the annual data.

Meanwhile, the number of employed people reached 26-point-five million last December, up 317,000 from a year earlier. 

The manufacturing sector, the mainstay industry that accounts for a fifth of employment in South Korea, had four-point-46 million workers on its payroll last month, down three tenths of a percent from a year earlier.
Park Jong-hong, KBS World Radio News.