Search Results for: Austria

BY KEITH NUTHALL
RELIABLE statistics are of course vital to any insurance company’s assessment of risk, and nationally produced figures in countries such as Britain and the USA can usually be counted upon in actuarial calculations. But what about comparing countries when managing international policy portfolios?…

BY ALAN OSBORN
SEEN in the context of the past decade, the entry of 10 new member states to the European Union (EU) which took place on May 1 has proved nothing like the disaster for the nuclear industry that was once feared.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BELGIUM is the European Union’s (EU) salmonellosis hotspot according the latest comparative figures collated by Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency. In 2001, 104 cases were recorded in Belgium per 100,000 people, with other high figures being recorded in Germany (94 cases), Luxembourg (83) and Austria (81).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRITAIN has been given a relatively clean bill of health in the latest Transparency International corruption rankings, being viewed as joint-11th least-corrupt country in the world, sharing its billing with Canada and Luxembourg. Finland was the most honest place in which to do business said the pressure group’s survey, followed by Iceland and the Denmark plus New Zealand at joint third.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A EUROPEAN Union-funded research consortium is developing an industrial system for producing biodegradable plastics from whey, separated from milk curd during cheese-making. Around 30 per cent of the 50 million tonnes of whey produced in Europe annually is currently discarded, and the Euro 1.6 million WHEYPOL project is creating process to synthesise polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) generated from whey into plastic.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL and ALAN OSBORN
ACCESS rights to drive across ecologically-sensitive Alpine passes in Switzerland and Austria – plus to Bulgaria and Romania – are being granted to hauliers from the 10 eastern and southern European countries joining the European Union (EU) in May.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THEY’RE not to everybody’s taste, we quite agree, but there’s no doubt that flavoured cigars have a very devoted band of followers and can no longer be dismissed as a passing fancy. Indeed after speaking to a number of the big players it is easy to gain the impression that the flavoured, (or aromatic), segment has (along perhaps with filters) been the only one to buck the cigar sector’s trend of falling or stagnant sales in recent years.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE ASSOCIATION of British Insurers (ABI) is pressing the UK Government to maintain its raised level of spending on flood defences, as it works towards its next public spending round announcement in the summer. Following the spate of disastrous floods in 2000, Whitehall in 2002 increased its annual spending on the problem by Pounds 150 million.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is taking Germany and Austria to the European Court of Justice, asking it to order the abolition of a system requiring licensed private organic food production inspection offices to be located on their national territories.…

Keith Nuthall
INTERNATIONAL Monetary Fund (IMF) policies towards borrower countries will henceforth be influenced by their capacity to implement Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendations on fighting money laundering. IMF directors have agreed these assessments “do not contravene the prohibition of the Fund to exercise law enforcement powers”.…