As the Spring Festival is drawing near, many Hangzhou-based enterprises charter couches to transfer employees going to and from Zhejiang Province for free, while quite a few out-of-province employees stick to their posts. Recently, Hangzhou Employment Service Center has announced labor-friendly measures to ensure stable production of enterprises during the Spring Festival by encouraging employees to return work and stick to posts and by offering more jobs for employees.

To encourage employees to return to work, Hangzhou will compensate 50% of the fee for chartering couches to pick up employees from outside the province to return to work, with capped subsidiary of 200,000 yuan for each enterprise and 500 yuan for each out-of-province employee who covers social insurance in Hangzhou and sticks to the post for two days during the Spring Festival.

To offer more jobs for employees, Hangzhou will hold 100 online and offline job fairs where several thousand enterprises will offer ten thousand jobs. In addition, to ensure employment of personnel in bottom strata, Hangzhou will offer a number of public posts for personnel in difficulty and provide them with precise assistance in employment.

Russia’s Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that the Russian Finance Ministry will not resume foreign currency purchases this year, including RMB, and will do so only if it receives additional oil and gas revenues in 2023 beyond the budgeted base.

Earlier, the finance minister did not rule out buying “friendly” foreign currencies on the market this year, he noted, referring to the purchase of RMB. In this case, Siluanov said, the excess oil and gas revenues will be calculated using the cessation of supply prices initially set in the 2022 budget, before the suspension of budget rules due to strict sanctions against Russia.

According to Business News International, Kommersant cited a report by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) as saying RMB international settlement rose 15.6 percent, compared with a 19.86 per cent increase in October.

International settlements in other currencies grew by 3.9 percent in the latest month, the report said.

RMB maintained the fifth most active currency for international payments, accounting for 2.37%. In November 2022, the RMB ranked sixth in terms of international payments outside the euro area, accounting for 1.63%.

Earlier on December 1, 2022, the Bank of Russia announced that the share of RMB trading volume in total foreign exchange transactions on Russian exchanges rose from 3% in March to 33% in November.