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Labor Market: Get the Job Done

Jan 20-2022   



A range of factors were converging to make China’s job market an unoptimistic one in 2022, and policies on several fronts should be rolled out to cope with it, said Prof. Lu Feng of the NSD in the sixth National Development Forum.

 

University graduates would number 10.76 million in 2022, surging above the 10-million bar for the first time. Adding in graduates of technical secondary schools and army veterans, and the number of job seekers was on way to touch a historical height. This would coincide with macro-constraints on job creation resulting from the onerous tasks of stabilizing growth, said Prof. Lu. The situation might be slightly alleviated as those born in 1962, a baby boom year, were to retire and open up some vacancies. Yet the balance between job supply and demand would remain tight and taut.

 

This would come on the heel of insufficient employment recovery in 2021 due to the pandemic. Despite hitting the annual target, the number of newly created jobs in non-farming sectors was still 9% lower than that in 2019. The hardest hit were the migrant workers, who as a group could have lost tens of billions of yuan in income.

 

Prof. Lu urged timely and concrete implementation of the proactive monetary, fiscal and structural policies decided by the Central Economic Working Conference. In addition, he called for improvement to policy coordination and overall efficiency. As the economy grew at a rate lower than its potential, it was imperative not to adopt tight macro-economic policies, he said. At the same time, the oversight of some industries and sectors could be optimized to reduce job losses and avoid severe impact on certain parts of the economy. Moreover, cross-cycle adjustment, a new guideline of the macro-policy authorities, should improve its expectation accuracy by gleaning insights from experience.

 

Furthermore, efforts had to be made to stimulate the vitality of market entities for job creation. In particular, supportive policies such as tax reduction and credit expansion should be made available to small and medium-sized enterprises. Concerning families and individuals, Prof. Lu advised using e-CNY to give a one-off (or perhaps in limited rounds) and large-scale subsidy to low-income residents and the unemployed. Attention should also be paid to workers in the gig economy by ensuring universal coverage of social security.

 

Labor Market: Get the Job Done

Jan 20-2022   



A range of factors were converging to make China’s job market an unoptimistic one in 2022, and policies on several fronts should be rolled out to cope with it, said Prof. Lu Feng of the NSD in the sixth National Development Forum.

 

University graduates would number 10.76 million in 2022, surging above the 10-million bar for the first time. Adding in graduates of technical secondary schools and army veterans, and the number of job seekers was on way to touch a historical height. This would coincide with macro-constraints on job creation resulting from the onerous tasks of stabilizing growth, said Prof. Lu. The situation might be slightly alleviated as those born in 1962, a baby boom year, were to retire and open up some vacancies. Yet the balance between job supply and demand would remain tight and taut.

 

This would come on the heel of insufficient employment recovery in 2021 due to the pandemic. Despite hitting the annual target, the number of newly created jobs in non-farming sectors was still 9% lower than that in 2019. The hardest hit were the migrant workers, who as a group could have lost tens of billions of yuan in income.

 

Prof. Lu urged timely and concrete implementation of the proactive monetary, fiscal and structural policies decided by the Central Economic Working Conference. In addition, he called for improvement to policy coordination and overall efficiency. As the economy grew at a rate lower than its potential, it was imperative not to adopt tight macro-economic policies, he said. At the same time, the oversight of some industries and sectors could be optimized to reduce job losses and avoid severe impact on certain parts of the economy. Moreover, cross-cycle adjustment, a new guideline of the macro-policy authorities, should improve its expectation accuracy by gleaning insights from experience.

 

Furthermore, efforts had to be made to stimulate the vitality of market entities for job creation. In particular, supportive policies such as tax reduction and credit expansion should be made available to small and medium-sized enterprises. Concerning families and individuals, Prof. Lu advised using e-CNY to give a one-off (or perhaps in limited rounds) and large-scale subsidy to low-income residents and the unemployed. Attention should also be paid to workers in the gig economy by ensuring universal coverage of social security.