[THE INVESTOR] South Korea’s jobless rate increased slightly in August from a year earlier, with the unemployment rate for young adults still remaining high, a government report showed Sept. 13.

The unemployment rate stood at 3.6 percent last month, compared with 3.5 percent tallied in July, according to the report compiled by Statistics Korea.

The number of employed people stood at 26.5 million in August, up 387,000 from a year earlier, with the monthly gain expanding sharply from the previous month’s 298,000.

The unemployment rate for young people, aged between 15 and 29, reached 9.3 percent last month, up slightly from July’s 9.2 percent.

The statistics agency said the monthly gain in employment is led by the construction, wholesale and retail sectors.

However, the sluggish manufacturing sector clouded the monthly job creation as the country’s exports have remained in doldrums for nearly two years.

The number of employees at manufacturing companies fell by 74,000 last month from a year earlier, marking the largest on-year drop since April 2012, when the comparable figure was 80,000.

“The manufacturing industry is directly affected by exports, which have just snapped the 19-month consecutive negative growth in August,” said Sim Won-bo, the head of the agency’s employment statistics division.

“The shipbuilding sector has been undergoing harsh restructuring, which also pushed up unemployment as a whole.”

The unemployment rate in Ulsan, where the country’s No. 1 shipyard Hyundai Heavy Industries is headquartered, soared 1.2 percentage points on-year to a 16 year-high of 4 percent.

South Gyeongsang Province saw its rate gain 1.6 percentage points to 3.7 percent over the one-year period, marking the highest rate since 1999 in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

(theinvestor@heraldcorp.com)