Small and medium enterprises expect hiring people will become even harder than how it is now amid the tight labour market after the government announced measures to curb the inflow of foreign workers. In unveiling measures to help Singaporeans in the government's budget for 2012, Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said that to reduce the country's dependence on foreign labour, the ratio of foreigners workers companies can employ will be lowered starting from July this year. The cap for the manufacturing sector will be brought down to 50 per cent from 65 per cent. For the services sector, the maximum share of foreign workers will be cut to 45 per cent from 50 per cent. "As it is currently, SMEs are already having some problems... in terms of getting labour, so lowering the dependency ratio (ceiling) would not really help the situation," said Ang Yuit, managing director of IT digital services company The Adventus Consultants. "If they're looking to kick in by July this ye! ar, that's going to be a bit of a challenge for most SMEs," he said. "We are trying to do productivity improvements and so on, but there are limits to how much labour there is. So this is a bit of a concern for us." In an interview with Yahoo! Singapore, Kurt Wee, vice president of the Association of Small and Medium Enterprises, described measures in trying to help SMEs as "comprehensive", but the downside was the lower dependency-ratio-ceiling (DRC) for the services sector. "A lot of manufacturing
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