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Europe needs more skilled labour: Trichet

VENICE: Europe urgently needs more skilled labour and greater investment to promote growth without inflation, French central bank Governor Jean-Claude Trichet said on Sunday.

"We call for more skilled labour and more labour in general, more investment capacity as well as investment and a speeding-up of productivity," he told Reuters on the sidelines of a conference in Venice, speaking in English

"This helps improve the growth potential, because it helps eliminate the inflationary bottlenecks in the economy and because it paves the way for sustainable non-inflationary steady growth that will create jobs and diministh unemployment."

Trichet said the Internet revolution had created new opportunities but Europe had not invested sufficiently in training staff to seize them.

Italian Treasury Minister Giuliano Amato echoed Trichet's words. "Europe has a gap of 600,000-700,000 jobs which could be filled if there were the people trained to do them," Amato told a news conference.-Reuters