Recruiting in China

HONG KONG, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs' senior China economist, Hong Liang, has resigned amid reports saying she plans to join a mainland Chinese competitor.

A source at the investment bank (GS.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) said on Tuesday that Liang had a disagreement with the bank's management and wants to move into capital markets. Liang could not be reached for comment. A Goldman Sachs spokesman said Liang, a Hong Kong-based executive director of Asia economic research at the bank, resigned last week.

According to the South China Morning Post newspaper, she is likely to join Beijing-based investment bank China International Capital Corp (CICC), which is partly owned by Morgan Stanley (MS.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz). CICC could not be reached for comment.

The Goldman Sachs spokesman denied a report in the South China Morning Post that professor Song Guoqing, a senior economist at Peking University, had also resigned as an adviser at Goldman's China joint venture, Gaohua Securities. (Reporting by Alan Wheatley and Susan Fenton, Editing by Ken Wills)

INITIAL jobless claims in the United States fell for a third straight week, a sign companies may be slowing the pace of job cuts.

The number of Americans filing first-time claims for unemployment benefits decreased by 10,000 to 425,000 in the week ended last Saturday, from a revised 435,000 the prior week. The number of people staying on rolls rose to 3.423 million, the highest since November 2003.

Companies are trimming staff and freezing hiring plans as demand softens, forcing workers to stay on government assistance. Rising unemployment heightens job-security concerns and contributes to a slowdown in consumer spending.

"The job situation still looks bleak to many," Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors Inc in Pennsylvania, said before the report. "Falling home prices and job losses are still hanging over consumer spending, and it is unlikely to change in the near term."

Economists had forecast claims would fall to 425,000 from a previously reported 432,000 in the prior week, according to the median of 41 projections in a Bloomberg News survey. The four-week moving average of initial claims, a less volatile measure than the weekly figure, dropped to 440,250 from 446,250, the report showed.

So far this year, weekly claims have averaged 375,400, compared with 321,000 for all of 2007.

The jump in claims that began in mid-July is due to the extension of jobless benefits under the spending bill signed by President George W. Bush in June.

Growth in employment should stay stable after the Olympics. This is according to the Vice Minister of Labor and Social Security, who made the announcement on Friday.

Hu Xiaoyi says close to 10 million more people have been employed every year in urban areas over the last few years, with the figure rising to 12 million last year. Hu Xiaoyi also says the Olympics has promoted industrial development thus far, but that any boost from the Games will only have a temporary effect. He stressed that development in the employment sector should be judged in the context of the overall economic situation.

For example, wild fluctuations in the global economy has cut down on job-creation in some industries. But, even so, figures show new jobs for up to 6.4 million people in urban areas for the first half of the year. That's 64 percent of the projected 10 million for the whole of 2008.

Millions of unskilled migrant workers could be forced to leave this southern boomtown in the face of its continuing industrial restructuring, a local statistician has said.

The lacking skills and general know-how of migrant farmers-turned-workers could make companies unwilling to employ them, Kong Ailing, chief of Shenzhen statistics team of National Bureau of Statistics, said.

Barely half of the more than 8 million of Shenzhen's total 12 million population who come from other areas only finished junior middle school education, and the working background of 56 percent was in the electronics, machinery, furniture, garment, toy, catering and services sectors, according to a recent survey by the statistics team.

Only one percent of this sizable social group in the booming city, the forerunner of the country's reform and opening-up, were actually skilled workers, the survey concluded.

"Workers' poor education could be seen as hampering companies' innovation potential in a city where knowledge and technologies become more and more important," Kong said.

The municipal government allocate resources toward training its migrant workers and also cooperate with some corporations and the communities to satisfy the demands of high-end industries, she said.

"Migrant workers, if better trained and educated, will promote the city's economic growth," senior researcher with Shenzhen Academy of Social Sciences, Yang Lixun, said.

Since setting up its first free training school for migrant workers earlier this year, the local government has set itself the target of training 1 million unskilled workers over the next five years.

SHANGHAI (AFP) — China's central bank has more than doubled the amount entrepreneurs and small businesses can borrow as part of efforts to boost employment, officials said.

The maximum amount that can be loaned to individuals for business purposes was raised to 50,000 yuan (7,300 dollars) from 20,000 yuan, the People's Bank of China said in a statement posted on its website late Monday.

The limit on loans to labour-intensive small businesses was doubled to two million yuan from one million yuan, according to the notice distributed to local authorities and banks earlier this month.

"(We) need to enhance the policy support for labour-intensive small enterprises, prompt them to hire more jobless people," the central bank said.

Some small businesses in China have been forced to shut down after being hit by slowing export growth and the government's tighter credit conditions aimed at fighting inflation.

The large number of small businesses going bankrupt -- many of them focused on labour-intensive products for export like textile and toys -- has raised unemployment and concerns about possible social instability.

Beijing has long said the official unemployment rate remains below five percent.

SHARES in Michael Page International Plc, the United Kingdom's second-biggest recruitment company, fell the most in eight months in London trading yesterday.

The dive came after Michael Page said it had rejected a 1.3-billion-pound (US$2.4 billion) takeover from Adecco SA and ended talks, Bloomberg News reported.

Michael Page fell as much as 8.4 percent, after turning down the Swiss firm's offer of about 400 pence a share.

The proposal "materially undervalued" the company and the structure of the deal was "unattractive," Michael Page said yesterday.

"People believe that the chance of an Adecco acquisition of Michael Page going through has diminished," said Julian Cater, an analyst at Collins Stewart.

A takeover of Michael Page would have given Adecco a specialist recruiter with expanding operations in the Far East and central Europe.

Michael Page traded down 21.25 pence at 313.75 pence as of 11:46am yesterday. Adecco shares rose 0.1 percent to 50.7 Swiss francs (US$46.20) in Zurich trading yesterday.