The Best And Worst Countries For New Jobs: Neither are U.S.

From Forbes | Klaus Kneale,
09.12.09, 01:00 PM EDT

Businesses are much more optimistic about hiring in some nations than in others.

In Pictures: The Best Countries For New Jobs

In Pictures: The Worst Countries For New Jobs

Where
did all the jobs go? It has been a rough year for employment all over
the globe, but the outlook right now is definitely better in some
countries than in others.

The employment services firm Manpower's

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latest Global Employment Outlook Survey finds that in some places
considerably more businesses expect to be hiring than firing--even
though in every single country the outlook is less optimistic than a
year ago. To conduct the survey, Manpower polled human resources and
hiring professionals at 72,000 companies in 35 countries. It measured
what percentage of them expect to be hiring in the next quarter,
between October and December of this year, what percentage expect to be
firing, and then tallied up the difference as "net employment outlook."

The big winners: India and Brazil--sort of. India has the best
net employment outlook of all. Seasonally adjusted, it comes to +25%.
However, that's a decline from +39% in the fourth quarter of last year.
That's a clear sign that even in the strongest growth areas optimism
isn't back in full force.

This was Manpower's first look at
Brazil, but the country made a strong first impression. The net
employment outlook there came in at +21%. If you want the best shot at
a job in Brazil, go for a services job somewhere around Rio de Janeiro.
The strongest sector is services, and the Rio is the most optimistic
region.

Using seasonally adjusted data where available, only two
countries kept exactly even with their employment outlook from the
fourth quarter of last year: Italy and the U.K. Both expected and
continue to expect more firing than hiring. Italy is among the five
countries with the most negative outlooks.

The five most optimistic countries, as the accompanying slideshow reveals, are all in Asia and Latin America. The five most pessimistic are all in Europe--except for Japan.