China / Services employment has climbed for four years

Seven years ago, Cheng Shuangping quit her assembly job at an electronics company in central China to move to Beijing to work as a waitress and a clothing saleswoman before managing a foot-massage spa.

“The assembly work was boring and the pay was meager,” Cheng, 34, said in an interview at Oriental Foot Massage near the Olympics stadium. Now, she earns about 6,000 yuan ($960) a month, or four times her pay in her home city of Hefei, which has about one-third the capital’s population. Services employment has climbed for four years, according to surveys by HSBC Holdings Plc and Markit Economics, while official data show manufacturing jobs shrinking for the past eight months.

Creating more jobs like Cheng’s will be key to limiting unemployment and meeting the Communist Party’s goal of an economy driven more by consumer demand and less by exports and investment. The country estimated its proportion of workers in services industries at 35.7 percent in 2011, less than Japan’s level in 1955, according to International Monetary Fund data.

“Authorities should take measures including liberalizing the financial sector and tackling monopolies in some key industries such as telecom to boost services job creation and consumption,” said Joy Yang, chief Greater China economist at Mirae Asset Financial Group in Hong Kong, who formerly worked for the IMF. “This should help economic rebalancing but the process could be long.”

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from

via China Services Job Gains Key for Shift to Consumption: Economy – Bloomberg.