Liaoning, the only pilot province selected to establish China's first independent province-wide social security system, has vowed to create over 3 million jobs in the next five years to ease the burden of unemployment.
Liu Kegu, deputy governor of Liaoning, said that among the new job vacancies some 1.8 million will be created in the tertiary sector, and 500,000 are expected to be labor exports.
The efforts will help control the province's unemployment rate at around 5 percent by that time, Liu promised.
The northeastern province has the largest number of laid-off workers of all the provinces in China. Debt-ridden state-owned industrial firms are the source of the lay-offs.
Liaoning is home to one tenth of the country's large and medium- sized state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Some 2 million SOE workers have been laid off in recent years. By the end of last year, the total number of jobless people in Liaoning was nearly 400,000.
This year, Liaoning's state-owned sector will continue to reduce staff by 150,000, while altogether some one million people need jobs.
Bo Xilai, governor of Liaoning, said that employment has become the number one problem for the provincial government.
In addition to adjusting the economic structure to deepen the reform of state-owned companies, the province will help unemployed workers regain competitiveness in the job market by offering more training courses, said Liu.
Liaoning will strive to improve the after-training reemployment rate to 60 percent. This year, some 500,000 people in the province will receive a variety of training courses.
( People’s Daily 08/08/2001)
