CPC to address concerns on rising inequality

[email protected] (The Hindu)
November 13, 2012

China_migran

Beijing, November 13: Top Communist Party of China (CPC) officials on Monday pledged to expand the construction of low-income housing and to provide more support to a job market facing pressures from a continuing slowdown, amid growing public concerns about widening social inequality in the country.

As the Party prepares for leadership change, how it grapples with surging real estate prices, shutting out an increasing number of Chinese from buying homes; and how it will ensure employment for the millions of graduates and migrant workers flooding cities every year, are among its most pressing challenges, say officials and scholars.

Jiang Weixin, who heads the Ministry of Housing and Urban-rural Development, told reporters on Monday at a briefing along the sidelines of the 18th National Congress, which will conclude on Wednesday, that the government plans to build at least five million units of homes next year, following the construction of more than seven million units this past year.

Mr. Jiang acknowledged the problems affecting the provision of housing, starting with widespread complaints about a lack of transparency in the allocation of low-income homes. China plans to build 36 million units under the correct Five-Year Plan (2011-15). In the first year of the plan, the government built 10 million units at a cost of around $ 200 billion.

Rising real estate prices, coupled with problems in the provision of homes, have fuelled anger about the housing sector in recent months. According to China Development Research Foundation report, an official think-tank, local governments were shirking their responsibilities of building low-income housing projects. Instead, they were pursuing more lucrative luxury projects. Recent audits conducted by the central government found that close to three billion Yuan allocated for low-income housing developments had been diverted for other projects.

Assuaging concerns about rising real estate prices, Mr. Jiang said the government would not relax recently enforced property restrictions, such as barring third-home purchases. He said it was also “actively studying” expanding an experimental property tax, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

According to October's figures, housing sales rose 5.6 per cent after 10 months of this year to 4.63 trillion Yuan ($ 735 billion). Property investment accounts for 13% of China's gross domestic output and one-fifth of fixed asset investment, presenting the government with a tough balancing act while introducing cooling measures.

Separately on Monday, a CPC official in charge of employment, Yang Zhiming, warned that the job market in China was “feeling the pressure from the country's economic downshift”. “The impact of economic slowdown on the job market is starting to emerge”, Mr. Yang, who is also the Vice Minister of Human Resources and Social Security, told reporters. He said the growth of newly added jobs had been narrowing since April, exerting pressure on the job market with seven million college graduates estimated to have entered the job market this year. “China will continue to face the problem of labour oversupply for a long time,” he said, with urban employment at 4.1 per cent, below the government's 4.6 per cent target limit. The government, he added, would take steps to “boost labour-intensive industries” and “strategic emerging industries” to accelerate job growth, and would also encourage students to work in less developed central and western China.

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News Network
February 22,2020

Johannesburg, Feb 22: To meet shortage of skilled nursing staff, private hospitals in South Africa are recruiting senior Indian nurses for their good work ethics and ability to become efficient trainers for the local staff, according to a media report.

A report at a 2018 jobs summit indicated that the country had a shortage of more than 47,000 nurses.

The shortage of the skilled nursing staff has been attributed to several factors, including preference of highly qualified nurses to emigrate or take up contract employment in countries such as the UK, the United Aarb Emirates, Saudi Arabia or New Zealand for want of higher salaries, a report in the weekly Business Times said.

Mediclinic, one of South Africa's largest private hospital groups, confirmed that it is recruiting 150 nurses from India this year.

“To supplement our training, as an internal strategy, we will continue to recruit senior registered nurses from India,” a Mediclinic spokesperson told the Business Times.

Mediclinic started recruiting nurses from India in 2005 but could not provide details about how many among the more than 8,800 nurses it employs at its hospitals are from India.

Another company, Life Healthcare SA, said it employed 135 Indian nurses between 2008 and 2014.

Top managements at the hospital groups lauded senior Indian nurses as being very efficient trainers for local staff.

“But we find that many of them prefer coming here on short-term contracts due to family commitments," a hospital executive said on the basis of anonymity.

The official said that the few who apply for long-term positions are usually young newly-qualified nurses, which is not the group in demand.

“They work hard, with a patient-oriented work ethic, and do not have the nine-to-five approach of many local nurses, especially those who are unionised," the official said.

“We would be very happy to take in more nursing staff from India," the official added.

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News Network
June 27,2020

Moscow, Jun 27: The number of people who have contracted the coronavirus infection in Russia has increased by 6,852 over the past day to a total of 627,646, the country's COVID-19 Response Center said in a daily update on Saturday.

"Over the past day, 6,852 new COVID-19 cases were confirmed in 85 regions of Russia, including 2,058, or 30 per cent, of asymptomatic cases," the response centre said.

Of the total 6,852 newly detected cases, 750 have been confirmed in Moscow, 366 in Moscow Region, and 280 in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area, according to the report.

The reported daily dynamics included 188 new fatalities, which brought the cumulative death toll to 8,969.

Total recoveries now count 393,352, an increase of 9,200 over the past day, including 1,852 in Moscow, 1,421 in Moscow Region and 716 in St. Petersburg.

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Agencies
July 7,2020

Washington, Jul 7: The US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee will grill the CEOs of US tech giants Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon during an antitrust hearing on July 27.

Apple's Tim Cook, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai and Amazon's Jeff Bezos will testify before the antitrust panel that is working on proposals to reform and regulate the digital market.

The hearing would mark the first time all four top executives testify together in front of Congress, virtually or in-person depending on the panel's call in the COVID-19 pandemic times.

"Since last June, the Subcommittee has been investigating the dominance of a small number of digital platforms and the adequacy of existing antitrust laws and enforcement," House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-RI) said in a statement on Monday.

"Given the central role these corporations play in the lives of the American people, it is critical that their CEOs are forthcoming. As we have said from the start, their testimony is essential for us to complete this investigation.”

The House Judiciary Committee announced its antitrust probe into the four tech giants in June last year.

Last month, the committee sent letters to technology giants Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet (Google's parent company), asking them to confirm if their chief executives will testify as part of the committee's tech competition investigation.

Committee chair David Cicilline said the documents that the investigators sought were "essential" to the probe and that requests like this were part of the "appropriate process" to obtain them.

"The only CEO who has expressed reservation about appearing, through a representative, has been Amazon," Cicilline said. "No one in this country is above the law ... nobody is above answering a congressional subpoena".

The lawmakers want the tech giants to furnish documents that have been produced in relation to other competition probes and internal communications.

The letters that the committee sent also posed questions related to possible harms to competition in the market.

In addition to the antitrust probe, Apple's App Store policies are also facing scrutiny from the US Department of Justice.

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