Financial Post, Weekly edition, Sat 17 Jun 95, page 16

Second job summit to be held after push by France

Greg Ip

The G-7 leaders have agreed to hold a summit on jobs early next year in response to France's urging co-operation on reducing unemployment.

Prime Minister Jean Chrtien said Friday the second jobs summit will take place in January 1996 in Lyon, France, well before the next leaders' summit. It will be attended by finance and labor ministers, but not the countries' leaders.

The ministers will meet ''to review the progress made in job creation and consider how best to increase employment in all of our countries,'' the G-7 communique said.

The meeting will be a follow-up to the first jobs summit held in Detroit in March last year.

The announcement is a triumph for newly elected French President Jacques Chirac, who campaigned on a promise of reducing unemployment in France, which has the G-7's highest jobless rate.

Unemployment was among the issues tackled by the leaders during their Friday discussions, and the communique said the leaders agreed on the need to upgrade the skills of workers and reduce regulatory barriers to job creation.

The French have promised to make the summit in Lyon next year even more intimate than the Halifax meeting. Finance, foreign and trade ministers will not attend as they did this year, officials said Friday. That may pose problems for the Japanese and German delegations, who bring along other ministers as representatives of the other parties in the ruling coalition.

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	Please send comments to: g8@utoronto.ca Revised: June 3, 1995

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