With an appearance of a hotel building, when one enters there's a traditional old style restaurant on the left hand side of the lobby. Many aged people with grey hair are sitting at the table sharing several kinds of traditional Dim Sims for the whole morning.

It is one of the oldest Chinese restaurants, Lan Xiang Kok, which has operated near the central area of Macau for more than 40 years. It is facing nowadays the problem of human resource shortage and fierce competition from large enterprises and even foreign companies.

"Nowadays people will not be willing to work in our field," the owner of the restaurant, Chan Wai Lin said, "especially young people, so normally our preferred labor force is non-residential workers."

Lan Xiang Kok is not the only Small- and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) which suffers from the human resource problem. At the moment, many other SMEs in the garment industry, wholesale industry, catering industry and logistic industry are also facing the same problem. According to the statistics from The Labour Affairs Bureau (DSAL), the top three vacant positions are garment workers, waiters and construction laborers demanded by local SMEs. They represent 10.8%, 9% and 8% of the total vacant positions respectively.

It is clear that the salary disparity, difficulties in management and change of business all are barriers for the development of SMEs. The statistics of DSAL indicated that SMEs in the garment industry can only afford to pay about MOP3000 per month to hire a worker. However, the casino industry can pay more then MOP12, 000 per month for a dealer, four times more than the garment industry.

In this rapid growth of the gambling industry in Macau, does it really bring benefit to every Macau citizen? Will it help to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor?

"The lack of local labor force is the real existing fact in Macau society," Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Macau Chamber of Commerce, Vong Kok Seng said in a seminar which was held in the University of Macau on April 11.

Vong continued, "In addition, many SMEs are not allowed to employ foreign workers when they are short of human resources." Vong suggested that government should relax its restrictions on importing foreign workers.

Based on the information from the Small- and Medium-sized Enterprise Association (SMEA), SMEs occupied 99% of the total number of businesses in Macau, covering the tourism industry, wholesale industry, logistics industry, science and technology, and printing industry, etc. It means that almost all the industries except casinos and international chain shops belong to SMEs.

In the statistic report from the Macau Statistics and Census Service (DSEC), the employed population was 286,000 from December 2006 to February 2007 which showed an increase of 2.4% compared with the period from December 2005 to February 2006 and it also registered a decrease of 0.7% in the unemployment rate compared with the same period the year before. Within a month, there was an increase of 2,096 in the numbers of non-resident workers. Furthermore, gross domestic product (GDP) of Macau in 2006 was estimated at MOP114.36 billion, with a growth of 20.1%. Although the value of net exports of goods and services grew considerably, the value of net exports of goods plummeted, and the growth rate of net exports of goods and services was smaller than the whole economy, which resulted in a slight fall of the share of net exports of goods and services in the city's economy from 40.2% in 2005 to 39.1% in 2006.

Since in every sector SMEs are short of labor force, few new workers are willing to work in SMEs. This leads to deterioration of the service quality and at the same time hindering the development. Under this situation, SMEs are struggling to survive; in order to maintain a business, they rely either on owners themselves or their family members.