KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia’s unemployment rate rose 0.1% to 3.2% in February 2015 from 3.1% in January, according to the Statistics Department.
It said on Friday the unemployment rate was however similar to a year ago.
“The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for February 2015 was 3.2%, up 0.2 percentage point compared with 3% in the previous month,” it said.
The department said the labour force participation rate in February rose 0.2 percentage points to 67.4% from 67.2% in January 2015.
“The increase was contributed by the increase of 62,700 employed personnel in the labour market,” it explained.
It said the number of employed rose 0.5% to 13.664 million in February, a 0.5% increase from 13.601 million in January.
However, there was a 2.9% increase in the unemployed at 454,900 from 442,000 from January. This was also a 1.9% rise from the 446,400 a year ago.
The department said unemployed refers to those who do not have a job but are interested to work. There are two groups of unemployed that is the actively unemployed and inactively unemployed.
The economic activity of a population depends on the demographic characteristics of that population. The proportion of economically active population, therefore, differs between sub-groups of that population.
These variations are measured by specific activity rates termed as labour force participation rate. Labour force participation rate is defined as the ratio of the labour force to the working age population (15 to 64 years), expressed as percentage.
Unemployment rate is the proportion of unemployed population to the total population in labour force. This rate measures the percentage of unemployed population in the labour force.
