GENEVA: Many companies in China's southern export hub are now finding it hard to recruit staff to handle orders as exports show signs of rebounding, a Chinese minister said on Monday.

The situation contrasts with earlier this year, when companies in Dongguan in the Guangdong region were forced to lay off migrant workers because of the global downturn, said Zhang Yutai, the minister in charge of the Development Research Centre, a thinktank under the State Council, China's cabinet.

"If you go to the Pearl River Delta, or to the Yangtze, many enterprises are experiencing problems with recruitment to cope with orders," he said.

This was mostly the case with skilled workers, but in some cases the shortage applied to unskilled workers too, he said.

Zhang said exports in August had grown 3.4 percent, seasonally adjusted, over the previous month, even though they were still 23.4 percent lower than a year earlier in the first eight months.

China, on some measures the world's biggest exporter, now expects exports for the whole year to come in 16-20 percent below 2008, with the decline reduced by the traditional upsurge in economic activity at the end of the year, he said.

The scope of the export rebound would ultimately depend on the size and scale of economic recovery in Europe and the United States, Zhang said.

Exports in September were 15.2 percent below their level a year earlier, official figures show.