. 9.
The other thing that I think it is important for us to remember is this is an economy which is increasing the number of jobs in it by 3 to 3.5 per cent a year. There are of course some economies around the world and around the region which are doing better than that but it is a pretty good striking rate. And we are, it is worth noting, doing that year after year, increasing the number of job opportunities for people in this economy.
I think that it is important for us to focus, as far as we can, on the ways in which we can continue to improve the mechanisms of the labour market to put people without a job in touch with the vacancies which are still there. I think it is extremely important that, as a number of speakers have suggested, that we work very rapidly after the studies have been completed on vocational training and on retraining to make sure that we have got the best possible arrangements for raising the skill levels of our workforce and allowing workers to move from one sector to another. And it is of course important for us, as Peter was saying earlier, to clamp down vigilantly on illegal employment and to make sure that unscrupulous employers and illegal workers are warned of the consequences of what they are doing.
The long term was touched on by the Financial Secretary in his contribution. The importance of us maintaining a highly competitive economy, the importance of us helping some of the new sectors where there is so much employment, like in services, without ignoring the important contribution which manufacturing makes to our economic well-being.
Most of the adjustments that have been made in our economy over the years have been made by the private sector, by adjustments within what is still perhaps the most open market in the world. I totally accept that there is an important role for government to support those market driven changes but I must say I would be pretty suspicious of any proposition that the Government itself should start intervening more and the Government should try to second-guess the market and try to get into the business once again which some European governments have done, with I think considerable damage to their economies, of attempting to discover winners and back them only to discover invariably that they were actually pouring a lot of money into losers.
The job for government is to make sure that we have the right educational skills, to make sure that we have the best sort of training, to make sure that we run our economy with the lowest possible tax with the maximum macro-economic success. And I think, to be honest, that if we can go on getting the sort of reports that we had recently from the International Monetary Fund, we won't be doing badly. I think that is an objective for all of us.