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Just over a year ago, the Cyprus government announced that subsidies helped employers hire 2,400 university graduates and jobless and that 20 mln euros would be spent in 2011 to promote new schemes and help curb the rise of unemployment.
One of these new schemes was ‘Green Skills’, with the Human Resources Development Agency establishing 34 new job categories, most at management level and suited for university graduates. The aim was to create new opportunities in the ‘green economy’ of managing environment protection services and natural resources, as well as the management of efficient methods and energy saving in existing job categories such as solar and wind park engineers, biofuel production managers, researchers and civil engineers working on eco-friendly constructions, climate control experts, and many other specialised positions.
But with 27 mln euros of the HRDA’s 33 mln budget coming from employers’ contributions, little seems to have been done to encourage employers to create the 5,700 new positions, especially with unemployment reaching 23% among young people. The Minister of Labour even declared that “by 2013, the ‘green economy’ will be responsible for 87,800 people in the labour market.”
The Green party is right to criticise the media fuss about “colossal investments” and “unimaginable profits” that the government and opposition forces have been talking about. Rightly so, they argue that fro the future prospects of the economy to sustainable, we should not rely solely on foreign investments, some of which will not create job opportunities in the local market, and that more should be pumped into projects that will encourage the development and growth in the skilled sector of the Cyprus labour force.
The incentives to promote the invest in efficient and alternative energy equipment is likened to a Pandora’s box, with few daring to open it and those who do, getting little out of it. Which is why we do not have photovoltaic panels on every single rooftop and property owners are discouraged by red tape from installing systems on vacant lots, which in turn would relieve the EAC’s power grid during greater surges of electricity demand.
Just consider that Cyprus needs to produce at least 16% of its power needs from alternative sources of energy by 2020, which means 300MW from wind parks, 192MW from solar parks, 75MW from solar thermal systems and 17MW from biofuels. At current market values, the total investment for all of these would be in the region of about 1.5 bln euros.
Imagine the job opportunities and the speed with which unemployment would be reduced, if only the government got serious about proper subsidies in the energy sector and for once took off its communist-era blinkers and stopped seeing each employer as the Satan that wants to suck the blood out of union-led workers.
