Indonesia could soon surpass Germany and the United Kingdom to become the world’s seventh largest economy, generating $1.8 trillion in annual gross domestic product, according to a recent report by McKinsey and Co.
Indonesia, a secular state, has the world’s fourth largest population and the world’s 16th largest economy. In terms of production, 55 percent of its population produces almost three-quarters of the country’s $837 billion economy.
Trade relations between two of Asia’s largest economies could take a hard hit as tensions over a territorial dispute escalate. Some of Japan’s largest firms have suspended operations at their Chinese plants as concerns over safety grow and anti-Japan sentiments and protests turn violent.
As the trade and economic interests of China and Japan have become increasingly intertwined, analysts warn that an escalation of the region’s territorial dispute could deal “a blow to the Asian economy and the global one as a whole.”
Anglo-Dutch oil giant Royal Dutch Shell Plc has called off attempts to drill for oil in the Alaskan Arctic for this year at least, said the New York Times on Monday, after a spill containment dome was damaged during a recent testing accident.
Wealthy clients across Europe could withdraw “hundreds of billions of francs” from their Swiss banking accounts over the next few years as a direct result of international pressure targeting the nation’s secretive banking practices, said UBS’s Head of Wealth Management Juerg Zeltner on Monday.
The troika inspectors, or officials from the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, arrive in Cyprus today for discussions over a bailout deal. Cyprus has become the fifth eurozone member to seek international aid after its banks buckled from contagion and large exposure to the Greek economy.
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke launched QE3 last week, a move that would see monthly bond purchases worth $40 billion carried out alongside Operation Twist. At the same time, Bernanke promised to undertake additional purchases and employ other monetary tools “if the outlook for the (US) labour market does not improve substantially”. How will this affect the US and other global markets?
The European Union is unlikely to go ahead with a proposal that would have forced publicly-listed companies to ensure a minimum 40 percent presence of women in their corporate boardrooms, said a report by the Financial Times on Sunday.
The proposed legislation, which would have been imposed across the entire EU, faced opposition by at least nine member states, who argued that the issue should be preferably dealt on a national, rather than regional, level.
The Power Grid Corp. of India, the largest state-owned electric utilities company in the country, is set to spend more than 1 trillion rupees ($18 billion) to upgrade its electricity networks, reported Bloomberg News on Monday, in order to avoid a repeat of the July 30-31 blackouts, which left more half of the nation’s 1.2 billion population without power.
Do university graduates have an advantage during an economic downturn? According to a recent study, individuals with only high school or equivalent education were more than three times as likely to lose their jobs as someone with either a college/university or associate’s degree.
Check out this infographic, which explores why higher education can help during times of recession; and take a look at employment stats by level of education throughout the recent financial downturn.
Diesel prices in India rose for the first time in nearly 15 months on Thursday, after the government decided to cut its subsidies for fuel, in a politically risky move that could save at least $3.7 billion for the nation’s state-run refiners.
