APA- Nouakchott (Mauritania) The Mauritanian employees of the private and public sectors will be granted a reduction on tax deductions in line with the 2008 finance law, Cheikh El Kébir Ould Chbih, the employment, insertion and vocational training minister, said on Sunday in a press briefing.

The employees who earn up to 30,000 ouguiya will be exonerated from a 15 percent tax as it was previously planned for the salaries pegged between 21,000 and 61,000 ouguiya, the minister told reporters in the presence of the national umbrella union leaders in Nouakchott.

Ould Chbih announced a series of measures including the creation of a housing fund for civil servants worth one billion ouguiya. In addition, he said 40 million ouguiya will be included in the budget as subsidies granted to umbrella unions and 800 million ouguiya for a fund to encourage self-employment and investment as part of the national insertion policy.

All these government measures aim at improving the living conditions of the underprivileged strata regarding the international economic situation, particularly due to the price hike.

The trade union leaders unanimously agreed on the relevance of these measures, but they diverged with the government on the process of decision-making which some of them termed as "unilateral".

The minister said these measures are the result of a mature thought and quality work to douse the shock of price hikes through the improvement of the purchasing power of the poor.

The reporters’ questions were particularly tied on the impact of this programme on certain social categories such as pensioners, the work-injury disabled or graded unemployed.

Ould Chbih affirmed that the government will resort to all means so that the funds allotted to this programme will not be routed away from their initial purpose.

The day before, the minister announced that the government should mobilise more than 1billion ouguiya by the end of the year to work out income-generating activity projects and the distribution of 6,605 tonnes of food supplies to vulnerable people.