Chile announced four billion U.S. dollars of fiscal stimulus plan to deal with financial crisis
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet on local time, Monday announced a four billion U.S. dollars’ fiscal stimulus plan to ward off the impact of the global financial crisis and strengthen the construction of infrastructure of public expenditure, and publish the amount of subsidy.
Michelle Bachelet said that the actual public expenditure in 2009 will increase 10.7 percent, which suggested the deficit this year will be equivalent to 2.9% of the gross domestic product (GDP). He also said that the scheme would lay the groundwork to achieve 2-3% GDP growth rate.
In Chile, the unemployment rate rose to 7.5 percent
Chilean officials said that by the end of November, 2008, Chile’s unemployment rate rose to 7.5 percent, mainly due to the global financial crisis dealt a blow to small and medium-sized loan.
Finance Minister Andres Velasco said that the worldwide economic crisis so far gave little impact on unemployment in Chile, but he warned that there may be large-scale layoffs in April in Chile.
Presidential Commission will advise to expand the public expenditure and provide assistance to small and medium enterprises, so as to avoid a large number of unemployed workers in January.
China’s urban unemployment rate climbed to 9.4 percent; employment has become a global problem
China’s State Council counselor Chen Quansheng pointed out that under the pressure of the global financial crisis, about 670 thousand small enterprises in China have been forced to close, about 6.7 million of the jobs have been evaporated, which is much higher than official statistics with 8.3 million people.
Aim at this issue, Premier Wen Jiabao specially urged during a recent inspection tour to Chongqing that the enterprises shall not easily lay off the employees and do everything possible to stabilize employment. Human Resources Social Security, the Ministry of Finance and Administration of Taxation jointly issued a circular recently to five major measures to alleviate the burden on enterprises.
British high unemployment rate in 2009 may increase the number of homeless people
According to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) report, the institution made a survey to 2015 people recently, about 9% of the respondents find it hard to pay for housing mortgages, 32.4 percent of people think that they are likely to lose their house or main source of income within three months. In the lower income group, 28% of the people are worried that they may be a result of the financial crisis and unemployment, whereas the proportion is 21% among the higher income groups. At the end of this year, the United Kingdom is expected to have 2,000,000 unemployed people.
The unemployment rate in Silicon Valley reaches 7%
California Center for Economic Research said last week that so far, Silicon Valley’s unemployment rate has been as high as 7%, the jobs are 4000 less than the same period last year.
The IT companies headquartered in the Silicon Valley from September this year have announced to lay off at least 38,000, including a number of well-known multinational companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Adobe, Sun and Palm companies. But the human resources company Watson Wyatt senior researcher Madeline Mcmenamin said in January next year, the unemployment situation in Silicon Valley would become even more serious.
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