Singapore’s unemployment rate close to pre-COVID levels
- Claire Lee
- Topics: Home Page - News, News, Recruitment, Singapore
Singapore’s unemployment is now close to pre-pandemic levels, Minister of Manpower Tan See Leng said at a CNBC news programme.
“We are seeing the long-term unemployment, which is defined as anyone who’s unemployed for more than six months, has dropped to about 0.8%. Pre-pandemic levels [were] about 0.7%. So, we’re actually quite close to what it was before COVID,” the minister said.
“For local unemployment, we are actually in a fairly good state. The unemployment has dropped. I think we’re close to pre-COVID levels,” he noted.
In Q1’2022, total employment in the city-state expanded by 42,000. Some 85% of that stemmed from non-residents as border restrictions were progressively lifted.
″[With] the easing of the borders, we have seen a huge uptake in terms of the number of foreign workers returning back into Singapore. Our construction manufacturing process has somewhat recovered to more than 90% of pre-COVID levels,” noted Tan.
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“With the significant relaxation of border restrictions, we expect the non-resident workforce to continue to recover, catching up with the strong resident employment growth over the past two years. This will provide some relief to the current labour market tightness,” the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) said in a release.
