Search Results for: World Trade Organisation

BY KEITH NUTHALL
TOO many cooks spoil the broth. Or do they? As far as the world’s fight against money laundering is concerned, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund think that they can bring extra flavour to the struggle waged by the OECD’s Financial Action Task Force (FATF).…

BY ALAN OSBORN
IT’S now official. Following agreement this week by its environment ministers, the European Union (EU) is to set up a market to trade pollution permits for carbon dioxide (CO2), the main so-called greenhouse gas, starting in 2005.

The European Commission is delighted, business is pleased, and while not all environmentalists are overjoyed, the balance of opinion among them is clearly favourable.…

From Alan Osborn
The UK has been given the go-ahead by the European Commission to provide up to pounds 3 millions in state aid to help road freight companies reduce carbon dioxide emissions over the next four years. Brussels said the schemes being considered under the UK Logistics Transaction Programme could help prevent about 350,000 tonnes of carbon emissions which would count as part of Britain’s commitments under the Kyoto protocol on climate change.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WATER privatisation has certainly had its critics, but it has a new supporter in the shape of the European Commission. It has publicly backed the growing privatisation of Europe’s water utilities, with its internal market commissioner praising British government moves to inject competition into its national sector.…

BY DENMARK FINCH AND FRITZ BRETT
INTRO

REDUCING stress amongst employees at work can make a major improvement to the bottom line of companies; indeed, so expensive is the problem, says the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, it is thought to cost the EU at least Euro 20 billion a year in lost time and health costs and affect more than 40 million of its employees.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SUCCESSFUL negotiations between the European Commission and the governments of Cambodia and Nepal have led to a deal over the extension of existing textile trade agreements between these Asian kingdoms and the European Union (EU). The Commission has asked European ministers to formally agree that these agreements should be prolonged until December 2004, appending a new list of textile products that can be imported into the EU without any quota limits.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
DOUBLE checking systems introduced by the European Union to police steel trade systems struck with eastern European countries who now want to become Member States are to be indefinitely extended. The European Commission has proposed that these monitoring systems be maintained in place to guard against illicit steel exports from the Czech Republic, Romania, Poland and Slovakia until they are finally accepted as formal members of the EU.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Union is to remove all textile import quotas applied to Brazil under a

Memorandum of Understanding signed between the two sides this month (November). In return, Brazil will respect maximum tariff levels, refrain from applying non-tariff barriers to EU exports, and discontinue the application of an additional tax on textile and clothing imports.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA and KEITH NUTHALL
THE GOVERNMENT of Sri Lanka is embarking on a comprehensive survey of the country’s clay resources as demand grows thanks to an official policy of promoting a home-grown ceramics industry, which is already the largest mineral-based sector in this south Asian country.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE ORGANISATION for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has launched a review of its guidelines on corporate governance, to assess how they might be reformed in the light of the accounting scandals that have dogged the US recently.…