Vietnam sent nearly 74,000 local people to work abroad in the first 11 months of 2006, up from 70, 600 in the whole 2005, local newspaper Saigon Liberation reported Monday.

The country's biggest labor markets include Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, China's Taiwan, and the Middle East, the paper quoted the Overseas Labor Management Department under Vietnamese Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs, as reporting.

Vietnam is expanding its labor export market to the United States, Italy and Australia, while further tapping traditional ones, in a move to realize its target of annually sending 100,000 people to work abroad in the 2006-2010 period.

The country has targeted to send 80,000 workers abroad in 2007.

As of late 2005, over 400,000 Vietnamese people were working in more than 40 countries and regions, generating combined annual income of around 1.6 billion U.S. dollars, the department said.

Source: Xinhua