UNIVERSITY graduates will be eligible for small loans to start up a business, according to a new policy to be implemented by the city government in the second half of this year.
Apart from tax breaks, university graduates, ex-servicemen and former rural residents in Longgang and Bao’an districts will also be eligible for factory rental subsidies, capital subsidies and rewards from the government for starting a business, Vice Mayor Li Feng told a meeting on employment Sunday.
If a business failed, the government would offer employment assistance, Li said.
The new policy was aimed at attracting more university students to Shenzhen to start their own business and to help workers cope with the difficulty of finding jobs amid the financial crisis, said Li. The existing policy provides incentives only for the unemployed, while the new policy has been expanded to cover more people, encouraging more residents to start their own business.
University graduates were precious human resource and were facing big problems in employment at the moment, so the city government encouraged each company to recruit at least one university graduate this year, helping them to cope with the problem, Acting Mayor Wang Rong said Sunday.
Companies should also create more opportunities for those having difficulty landing a job and offer more public welfare positions and employment assistance, said Wang.
Some 218,000 residents were employed and 33,000 laid-off people found jobs again last year. The registered unemployment rate was 2.3 percent and each family in the city had at least one member working last year, the meeting was told.
The city government plans to conduct 1,000 free job fairs for migrant workers this year and to provide them with free employment-related services to enhance their skills. In the first quarter of this year, there were about 1.6 million positions offered, attracting 1.69 million jobseekers, officials said at Sunday’s meeting.
To further improve the employment situation, the city government has set the unemployment rate at under 3 percent to ensure the unemployment period would be no more than six months, Li said.
(Wang Yuanyuan)