Also, the unemployment rate has been at around 3 percent, remaining at a high level compared with that prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. As presented in the right panel of Chart 7, the real wage income of employees has been on a recovery trend reflecting the employment situation I just mentioned, but it has not reached the pre-pandemic level.
I will now shift to business fixed investment. As shown in Chart 8, the business fixed investment ratio, which represents the share of the amount outstanding of fixed investment to nominal GDP, continues to pick up, although the level has not reached that observed until 2019.