New Economy, Underemployment, and Inadequate Employment

This paper will first review existing literatures and empirical results from national statistics on employment transformation, underemployment and gender effects on occupational restructuring. Then, we further examine the relation between unemployment and underemployment by conducting an empirical survey. From the national statistics, we found that the employment structure by industry in Taiwan is more toward the industrial production model that categorizes a high percentage of industrial employment. However, if we examined the employment structure by occupation, then a similarity toward the US model, which characterizes an increasing and high proportion of professional workers was found. From the trends of industrial and occupational structures in Taiwan, we argue that neither the increasing unemployment rates in manufacturing sectors nor the newly cost-disease problem in services, but the phenomenon of underemployment will significantly represent the problem of occupational transformation in Taiwan. A gender effect of