But he added that the state could prosper only by continuing to invest in education and maintaining a strong work force and a good quality of life.
"Southampton has a resort character with a strong second-home market and a strong work force, which provides services to that market and the local businesses," he said.
Goh's son, Hup Jin, is Nippon's executive director and also runs privately held JV Nipsea, a paints and coatings manufacturer, which has more than 50 factories and a 16,000 strong work force in 15 countries, covering markets such as China, Malaysia, India and Vietnam.
But its 13,0000-strong work force is larger than that of the Bundesbank, even though Germany is a larger country.
In other words, if someone wanted the information on the legislature's 25,000-strong work force, then that person had to independently identify them and submit 25,000 separate online requests.
The airline said it would try to achieve the cuts, equivalent to 3 percent of its 117,000-strong work force, via "socially responsible measures" like attrition and voluntary early retirements.
ABB Alstom Power, a multinational power generation company, announced a worldwide restructuring that would eliminate about 10,000 jobs from its 54,000-strong work force, including 5,400 jobs in Europe.
Company officials had said that in order to keep the carrier alive, adjustments were needed in the 12,400-strong work force, which operates about 120 planes and had 22.6 million passengers last year.
Ireland's course to the election was cleared on Thursday when lawmakers in the Dail approved a finance bill that included elements of the Cowen government's austerity package that had not previously been approved, including income tax increases for the country's two million-strong work force, up to an effective rate of 41 percent for many middle-income earners.
He said Greek banks faced an urgent need to be recapitalized so that money could enter the real economy and prop up small and medium-size enterprises, which account for 96 percent of all Greek businesses and employ around two million of Greece's four-million-strong work force.
But economists say that the lingering uncertainties within the nation's 140-million-strong work force help to explain why wage pressures, while on the upswing, remain more modest than they were in the milder and shorter economic booms of the recent past.
