The Productivity Commission has condemned government plans for an “effects test” that would make it easier to stop large businesses exploiting their market power against small businesses and farmers.
It has also criticised the Coalition’s toughening of foreign investment rules for the agriculture sector and said they should be liberalised again.
Foreign aid is a key instrument of international engagement in Japan’s foreign policy toolkit. Although Tokyo is no longer the world’s top aid donor that it once was in the 1990s, it still was the world’s number four aid donor in 2015 with close to a US$10 billion annual budget.
It is not just the size of the aid budget that has changed. So has Tokyo’s thinking behind foreign aid.
India is set to become the world’s fastest-growing major economy this year. However, as the nation of 1.2 billion grapples with how to achieve rapid and sustainable economic growth, it must also ensure that such growth is inclusive — a task that will require much-needed reform.
Theresa May has come into office talking about people who are “just managing”, but find life tough. Similarly, then Labour Party leader Ed Miliband talked about the squeezed middle in the build-up to last year’s general election.
Poverty in Australia has declined, welfare reliance has stabilised and long-term poverty is becoming rare – but overall economic wellbeing is no longer improving, and households’ wealth has remained static, despite rising property prices, according to Australia’s most respected longitudinal study of economic wellbeing.
And there is a rapidly growing wealth divide between generations, with median wealth increasing by 61% among people aged 65 and over, compared to just 3.2% among people aged 25 to 34, since 2001.
In November 2010, Ghana Statistical Services announced new and revised gross domestic product (GDP) estimates. As a result, the estimated size of the economy was adjusted upward by more than 60%, suggesting that in previous GDP estimates economic activities worth about US$13 billion had been missed.
The Australian dollar recorded a key downside reversal last Friday (July 15) and had seen follow through selling this week. It is off 1.25% over the past three sessions, which makes it the worst performing major currency behind the Japanese yen.
As this Great Graphic, composed on Bloomberg shows, the recent losses have pushed to Australian dollar close to the uptrend line drawn off the late-May low near $0.7150 and the spike low from Brexit (~$0.7300). The trendline is found near $0.7450 today.
The European Court of Justice upheld the principle of making creditors bear the burden for investment in banks that sour before government funds could be used. Italian banks are particularly sensitive to the ruling, which cannot be appealed because the European Banking Authority and European Central Bank stress tests on July 29 are expected to show that some Italian banks are under-capitalized.
In East Asia, rapid income growth in the second half of last century has produced unprecedented and rapid population ageing. Rising living standards and incomes tend to induce longer lifespans and fewer births per woman, leading to dramatic increases in the proportion of old people within the total population. Where it took France 115 years to double the share of its population that is 65 years and over from 7 to 14 percent, the same shift in China will take just 25 years.
On 4 November 2014, Lieutenant-Colonel Chizu Kurita of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force became the first Japanese military officer to be attached to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) headquarters in Brussels. As advisor to the NATO Special Representative for Women, Peace and Security in the office of the Secretary General, she has been primarily advising the body on the how to better integrate a ‘gender perspective’ into its policies and activities.
