The nation's shrinking workforce still has the baby blues.

With a global recession, advertisers are cutting back and many online sites are markedly suffering. We look at one company that looks as though it might just survive, and perhaps even flourish - GREE.

When economic times are hard, it is only natural for clients to want to cut costs. It is also only natural that they do so by reducing their reliance on outside parties and doing as much as possible in-house, or by dispensing with certain services all together. This means that if you're in the "dispensable" services category, such as training, marketing, translation, design, and technical support sectors, your company is probably also feeling the pinch of the recession. It can be very draining on sales staff morale when they go out to see clients and have to report back to the sales manager that yet another contract is going to be lost or reduced in size.

The government is ready to play ball on rice quotas.