Shanghai plans to monitor the changing unemployment figures with an early warning mechanism this year, said an official with the municipal government Tuesday.

"One of the major tasks for our bureau this year is to establish a mechanism for unemployment early warning," said Bao Danru, vice director of the municipal Labor and Social Security Bureau.

Shanghai, the economic powerhouse of China, has seen an unemployment rate of 4.3 percent.

Bao said that the statistics department will arrange a survey covering about 20,000 households by interviewing them twice a year on issues such as family members' occupations, income and living conditions, in order to get a better picture of the employment tendency in the city whose population is more than 17 million.

Experts will be invited to assess government economic policies, and analyze their impacts on employment structure, according to Bao.

He also noted that a database on laborers will be set up, which will follow the latest fluctuations in the numbers of the laid-off, unemployed and pensioners.

(Xinhua News Agency April 9, 2008)