South Korea’s jobless rate rose in December from a month earlier, with unemployment among young people hitting a 15-year high, government data showed Wednesday, AFP said. The jobless rate stood at 3.4%, up from 3.1% in November, Statistics Korea said. The seasonally adjusted rate inched up 0.1 percentage points to 3.5%. Unemployment among those aged 15-29 stood at 9.0%, the highest since 1999 when a new statistic basis was adopted. The number of employed people stood at 25.38m, up 422,000 from a year earlier. It marked the fourth straight month that the number of new jobs topped the 400,000 mark – a trend that senior Statistics Korea official Sim Won-Bo described as “encouraging.”
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