Category: Business

Canada said on Wednesday that it would need to see movement from the United States if the two sides are to reach a deal on renewing NAFTA, which Washington insists must be finished by the end of the month. Although the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump and its allies are increasing pressure on Canada to make the concessions they say are needed for the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made clear he also wanted to see flexibility. "We're interested in what could be a good deal for Canada but we're going to need to see a certain amount of movement in order to get there and that's certainly what we're hoping for," he told reporters in Ottawa. Shortly afterwards, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland…

Kenya's Finance Minister Henry Rotich has cut the government's spending budget by 55.1 billion shillings ($546.90 million), or 1.8 percent, for the fiscal year from July this year, a Treasury document showed on Wednesday. The government is facing a tough balancing act after a public outcry over a new 16 percent value added tax on all petroleum products forced President Uhuru Kenyatta to suggest to parliament to keep the VAT and cut if by half. In the document detailing the new spending estimates, Rotich said the budget had to be adjusted because of the amendments to tax measures brought by lawmakers when they first debated it and passed it last month. The proposed halving of the VAT rate on fuel has left the government with a funding shortfall, hence the…

In Kenya, a new taxi hailing app developed by local taxi drivers is in its fourth month of operation in Nairobi. Dubbed BebaBeba by the Drivers and Partners Association of Kenya (DPAK), it was created to compete with Uber and other ride hailing apps. Rael Ombuor reports from Nairobi. ...

Videos of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro feasting on steaks at an upscale restaurant have sparked worldwide outrage on behalf of the poverty-stricken people of his country. One video show celebrity chef Nusret Gokce, also known as "Salt Bae," carving meat for the president and his wife, Cilia Flores, at the Nusr-Et restaurant in Istanbul, where each cut of meat can cost hundreds of dollars. Florida Senator Marco Rubio slammed the chef who was filmed with the "dictator," who was shown eating "a five-star gourmet meal, smoking fine cigars while the people of Venezuela are literally starving." "It’s an outrage, disgusting ... this is a man starving human beings and [Salt Bae] is celebrating him as some sort of hero – I got pissed,” Rubio told the Miami Herald on Tuesday.…

Mexico's incoming financial intelligence chief said it was "shameful" how little had been done about bribes that Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht executives said were paid to secure Mexican public works contracts, and vowed to reexamine the case once in office. Santiago Nieto will head the finance ministry's Financial Intelligence Unit, which analyzes suspicious financial records, once the new leftist government takes office on Dec. 1. He said in an interview last week that the unit had been misused for political ends, without elaborating. "It's shameful that Mexico and Venezuela are the only countries in Latin America that haven't sanctioned anyone," he said of the Odebrecht case, which is at the heart of Brazil's Lava Jato, or Car Wash, corruption investigation that has reverberated across the region in recent years. "In…

China says it has no choice but to retaliate to U.S. President Donald Trump's 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods, risking a further escalation of trade tensions between the world’s two biggest economies.   In a brief statement posted online Tuesday, China’s Commerce Ministry said, "To protect its legitimate rights and interests and order in international free trade, China is left with no choice but to retaliate simultaneously."   The statement did not say how China might respond. China has previously said it would respond with a list of tariffs that includes products from liquified natural gas to aircraft.  On Monday, the Communist Party backed Global Times newspaper warned that if Trump went ahead with the tariffs, China would not just play defense.   At about the…

Africa has the globe's fastest-growing youth population as well as 10 of the poorest countries, a volatile combination that warrants making it "the world's most important priority for the foreseeable future." The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation lays out that argument in its second annual report on progress toward sustainable development goals set by the United Nations for 2030. This Goalkeepers Data Report, released Tuesday, urges targeting Africa with the same kind of investment intensity that lifted once-poor China and India into the ranks of middle-income nations. Sixty percent of Africans are younger than 24, numbers that Melinda Gates emphasized in a phone interview earlier this month with VOA's English to Africa Service. "If the world makes the right investments in health and nutrition and education," she said, it could…

The Asian Development Bank said on Tuesday it is expanding its presence in the Pacific islands, at a time of competition for influence there, opening seven new country offices and expecting its loans and grants in the region to top $4 billion by 2020. The pledge from the Japan-led bank comes amidst a vigorous new campaign by the United States and its allies to check China's rising sway in the region, where it has sought deeper diplomatic ties and emerged as the second-largest donor. The battle for influence in the sparsely populated Pacific matters because each of the tiny island states has a vote at international forums like the United Nations, and they also control vast swathes of resource-rich ocean. The ADB said it will open offices in the Cook…

With his popularity ratings in freefall, French President Emmanuel Macron is counting on a rebound in family purchasing power to keep voters from turning against his reforms. Macron's government has lined up several tax cuts taking effect in the coming months that should boost the closely tracked measure of disposable income in France. It could hardly come at a better time for Macron, with many voters saying the former investment banker has spent his first year in office cutting taxes for the wealthy and big companies. More purchasing power was the single biggest priority in voters' eyes, well ahead of cutting unemployment or the tax burden, according to a Kantar Sofres poll released on Sunday. Squeezed by tax hikes on petrol and tobacco as well as oil price-driven inflation, household…

A top economic adviser to President Donald Trump said on Monday he expects U.S. budget deficits of about 4 to 5 percent of the country's economic output for the next one to two years, adding that there would likely be an effort in 2019 to cut spending on entitlement programs. "We have to be tougher on spending," White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said in remarks to the Economic Club of New York, adding that government spending was the reason for the wider budget deficits, not the Republican-led tax cuts activated this year. Kudlow did not specify where future cuts would be made. "We're going to run deficits of about 4 to 5 percent of GDP for the next year or two, OK. I'd rather they were lower but it's…

More than half of all workplace tasks will be carried out by machines by 2025, organizers of the Davos economic forum said in a report released Monday that highlights the speed with which the labor market will change in coming years. The World Economic Forum estimates that machines will be responsible for 52 percent of the division of labor as share of hours within seven years, up from just 29 percent today. By 2022, the report says, roughly 75 million jobs worldwide will be lost, but that could be more than offset by the creation of 133 million new jobs. A major challenge, however, will be training and re-training employees for that new world of work. “By 2025, the majority of workplace tasks in existence today will be performed by…

Aid money urgently needs to be redirected to the poorest countries in order to reach the United Nations' goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, according to a report. The London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) says middle-income countries receive more aid than the 30 poorest nations. It also warns that at least 400 million people will still be living on less than $1.90 a day, despite government pledges to eliminate all extreme poverty. In northern Ethiopia, teams of workers dig irrigation channels through orchards and grain fields. Such projects have turned arid plains into fertile farmland, which has quadrupled agricultural production. The report from the ODI credits Ethiopia's "Productive Safety Net Program," launched in 2005, with lifting 1.4 million people out of extreme poverty. It also enabled Ethiopia to avoid…

U.S. President Donald Trump has instructed aides to proceed with tariffs on about $200 billion more in Chinese products, despite Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin's attempts to restart talks with China about resolving the trade war, Bloomberg reported on Friday. Reuters could not immediately verify the report, which had an immediate effect on financial markets. It led U.S. stocks to trade lower, fueled drops in the Chinese yuan in offshore trading and gains in the dollar index, and sent the S&P 500 index negative. The step comes exactly one week since Trump raised the possibility of duties on the $200 billion of imports and also threatened tariffs on $267 billion worth of goods. Trump has already levied duties on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods. The United States only imported $505…

The Turkish central bank caught international markets by surprise Thursday as it aggressively hiked interest rates in an effort to strengthen consumer confidence, stem inflation and rein in the currency crisis.  Interest rates were increased to 24 percent from 17.75 percent, which is more than double the median of investor predictions of a 3 percent hike. The Turkish lira surged above 5 percent in response, although the gains subsequently were pared back. International investors broadly welcomed the move. "TCMB [Turkish Republic Central Bank] did show resolve in hiking the one-week repo rate substantially and going back to orthodoxy," chief economist Inan Demir of Nomura International said. The central bank had drawn sharp criticism for failing to substantially raise interest rates to rein in double-digit inflation and an ailing currency. The…

Cuba’s street vendors are bringing back the pregon, the art of singing humorous, rhyming ditties with double entendres about the goods they are selling, with some modernizing the tradition by setting their tunes to reggaeton. The pregon is a centuries-old tradition that has inspired famous songs like “El Manisero” (the peanut vendor), composed in the late 1920s by Cuban musician Moises Simons on son music, the backbone of salsa. It faded out in Cuba after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution did away with most free enterprise. With the tentative liberalization of the centralized economy over the last few decades, however, it has made a comeback. Cubans can now get a permit to make and sell their own goods on the street, from coconut ice cream to juices. Vendors often opting for…

Even before U.S.-China trade tensions began escalating dramatically, foreign businesses who operate in China were warning about the impact tariffs could have. And now, according to a newly released joint survey from the American Chamber of Commerce in China and AmCham Shanghai, many are already feeling the pinch. More than 60 percent say the initial $50 billion in tariffs rolled out by the United States and China are having a negative impact on business, increasing the demand of manufacturing and slowing demand for products. That number is expected to rise to nearly 75 percent if a second round of tariffs, an additional $200 billion in tariffs from Washington and another $60 billion from Beijing, goes ahead. The administration of President Donald Trump has threatened it could go ahead with $200…

A new report by Transparency International suggests foreign bribery is alive and well.  The report, by the Berlin-based, anti-corruption watchdog, suggests little has changed in recent years in the way governments enforce their anti-bribery laws. Today, only seven major exporting countries actively crack down on companies that offer bribes to foreign officials in exchange for favorable business deals. The United States is one of the seven countries, which together account for 27 percent of world exports, Transparency International said. The others are Germany, Israel, Italy, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.  2016 a record year Between 2014 and 2017, the United States launched at least 32 investigations, opened 13 cases and concluded 98 cases involving foreign bribery, according to the report. Enforcement activity surged in 2016, resulting in a record…

Labor unions and social groups blocked streets in downtown Buenos Aires on Wednesday, with more marches planned over the days ahead over   austerity measures proposed by the government and backed by the International Monetary Fund. Protesters are angry about the belt-tightening policies, which are cutting services to low-income Argentines already walloped by inflation of 31 percent and climbing. But Argentine leader Mauricio Macri says he needs to carry out such measures to regain investors' confidence by reducing the country's fiscal deficit. The outlook for Latin America's third biggest economy is grim, according to orthodox and left-leaning economists alike. Planned cuts to public utility subsidies, forcing Argentines to pay more for transportation and electricity, are expected to keep upward pressure on consumer prices for the rest of 2018. "The day to…

The median U.S. household income reached $61,372 last year — its highest level ever, the U.S. Census reported Wednesday. The new median figure, meaning that half of U.S. families earned more money and half less, was a reflection of the robust U.S. economy, the world's largest, that expanded 4.1 percent in the April-to-June period even as the unemployment rate held steady in August at 3.9 percent. The 2017 household income was 1.8 percent higher than the $60,309 figure in 2016. Middle-class income in the U.S. has been expanding in recent years as the country continues its recovery from the steep recession of a decade ago — a time when millions of people lost their jobs, and many lost their homes through foreclosure when they no longer had enough money to…

South Korea's unemployment rate hit an eight-year high in August as mandatory minimum wages rose, adding to economic policy frustrations and political challenges for President Moon Jae-in whose approval rating is now at its lowest since inauguration. The unemployment rate rose to 4.2 percent in August from 3.8 percent in July in seasonally adjusted terms as the number of unemployed rose by 134,000 people from a year earlier. This was the labor market's worst performance since January 2010, when the economy was still reeling from the global financial crisis, when 10,000 jobs were lost. Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon said on Wednesday the government will need to adjust its wage policies, signaling some future soft-pedaling in the drive to raise minimum wages. "(The government) will discuss slowing the speed of minimum…

In Iraq, a major Middle East grain buyer, will cut the irrigated area it plants with wheat by half in the 2018-2019 growing season as water shortages grip the country, a government official told Reuters. Drought and dwindling river flows have already forced Iraq to ban farmers from planting rice and other water-intensive summer crops. Water scarcity was one of the issues galvanizing street protests in the country this year. An investigation by Reuters in July revealed how Nineveh, Iraq's former breadbasket, was becoming a dust bowl after drought and years of war. This latest move is likely to significantly raise wheat imports. Deputy Agriculture Minister Mahdi al-Qaisi said irrigated land grown with winter grains, namely wheat and barley, would be halved. "The shortage of water resources, climate change and…

Residents in a Bangkok neighborhood are trying out a renewable energy trading platform that allows them to buy and sell electricity between themselves, signaling the growing popularity of such systems as solar panels get cheaper. The pilot project in the center of Thailand's capital is among the world's largest peer-to-peer renewable energy trading platforms using blockchain, according to the firms involved. The system has a total generating capacity of 635 KW that can be traded via Bangkok city's electricity grid between a mall, a school, a dental hospital and an apartment complex. Commercial operations will begin next month, said David Martin, managing director of Power Ledger, an Australian firm that develops technology for the energy industry and is a partner in the project. "By enabling trade in renewable energy, the…

Policymakers in Indonesia are grappling to deal with a weakened currency, the rupiah, which was valued at just 14,930 per U.S. dollar last week — its lowest point since the 1998 Asian financial crisis. But unlike 20 years ago, when economic turmoil led to major political upheaval in Indonesia, most observers say that Southeast Asia’s largest economy is now far better positioned to endure a poorly performing currency. The United States Federal Reserve’s planned interest rate hikes have impacted emerging markets worldwide as investors sell assets in countries such as Indonesia in favor of American ones. The Argentine peso and Turkish lira both crashed in late August, crises that sent major shockwaves across developing economies. President Donald Trump’s trade war with Beijing has also seen a devaluation of the Chinese…

United States is a land of opportunity. We have all heard this saying, but what does it mean and how does it happen? A Kurdish-American family in the state of Virginia is seeing how their 13-year-old son has made the most of a unique opportunity. VOA’s Yahya Barzinji recently visited this family and filed this report narrated by Bezhan Hamdard. ...

Japan will once again try to get the international ban on whale hunting overturned at the global conference of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which opened in Brazil on Monday. The proposal presented by Japan says, "Science is clear: there are certain species of whales whose population is healthy enough to be harvested sustainably.'' While the Japanese proposal is supported by other traditional whaling countries, such as Iceland and Norway, it faces fierce opposition from countries such as Australia and Brazil, and the European Union, as well as from numerous environmental groups. Japan, which has pushed for an amendment to the ban for years, accuses the IWC of siding with anti-whaling nations rather than trying to reach a compromise between conservationists and whalers. Whale meat has been a a traditional…

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry met with Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih on Monday in Washington, the U.S. Energy Department said, as the Trump administration encourages big oil-producing countries to keep output high ahead of Washington’s renewed sanctions on Iran’s crude exports. Perry and Falih discussed the state of world oil markets, the potential for U.S.-Saudi civil nuclear cooperation and efforts to share technologies to develop “clean fossil fuels,” the department said in a statement. The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Perry will also meet with Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak, on Thursday in Moscow, a U.S. source and a diplomatic source said Sunday night. High oil prices are a risk for President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans in Nov. 6…

Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland will meet U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in Washington on Tuesday for another round of talks to renew the NAFTA trade pact, an official said on Monday, as time runs short to seal a deal. Freeland spokesman Adam Austen did not give details. After more than a year of negotiations, Canada and the United States are still trying to resolve differences over the North American Free Trade Agreement, which also includes Mexico. U.S. officials say time is running out to agree on a text on which the current Congress can vote. Canadian officials say they are working on the assumption they have until the end of September. Freeland spent three days in Washington last week and said on Friday as she prepared to leave that…

Greece's lead creditor warned the country on Monday not to stray from reforms agreed upon before the end of its international bailout, as European monitors arrived to check the nation's finances. The five-day inspection is expected to focus on government promises over the weekend to offer tax relief as well as plans to scrap promised pension cuts that are due to take effect in 2019. Klaus Regling, managing director of the European Stability Mechanism, the eurozone's rescue fund, told Austria's Die Presse newspaper that Greece needed to stick to its commitments. `We are a very patient creditor. But we can stop debt relief measures that have been decided for Greece if the adjustment programs are not continued as agreed," he said. "The debt level appears to be frighteningly elevated. But…