Search Results for: China

Keith Nuthall
THE CANADIAN government has sought to dispel fears that it has unfairly retained trade restrictions on textile and clothing imports from China and Taiwan following last year’s decision to allow them to join the World Trade Organisation. In two letters to the WTO’s Textile Monitoring Bureau, Ottawa has claimed that remaining “quantitative restraints” comply with the two new members’ accession deals and the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE TAIWANESE government has followed up its admission to the World Trade Organisation by telling the institution’s Textile Monitoring Body how it intends to implement the first three stages of the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, with which it must now comply.…

Keith Nuthall
CHINA has sought to allay fears that it is dragging its feet over the implementation of liberalisation commitments it made when it was admitted into the World Trade Organisation. It has released explanatory notes to the European Union and Canada, who have raised concerns over the opening of textile import quotas.…

BY MARK ROWE
BETAGRO, one of Thailand’s biggest agribusiness groups, has spent US$ 170 million on expanding chicken production, focusing on chicken sausages and balls for export. This follows a growth in demand in China, due to an outbreak of bird flu, and in Europe, because of the BSE epidemic.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
CHINA has attacked a ban by the EU on certain Chinese food imports on health grounds as ‘unacceptable’ and warned it could seriously affect bilateral trade. The European Commission voted to ban honey, poultry and rabbit meat, plus shrimps and prawns, following the discovery of “serious deficiencies” in China’s medical residue control system and “problems related to the use of banned substances in the veterinary field.”…

Keith Nuthall
NEW World Trade Organisation member Taiwan has told the institution’s Textile Monitoring Body how it intends to implement the first three stages of the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, with which it must now comply. Taipei said that for the first stage, restrictive import quotas would be removed from product lines representing 16.05 per cent of its total textiles imports in 1990, 17.15 per cent for the second stage and 18.36 for the third stage.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union ministers have been asked to approve anti-dumping duties of 28 per cent on Chinese exports into the EU of zinc oxide. The European Commission has made a formal application for this special protection after an inquiry confirmed conclusions reached in a preliminary study.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INTERNATIONAL Labour Organisation has released a report detailing how employment in the global oil and gas sectors has “shrunk dramatically” over the past 25 years. Citing “changing corporate structures and privatisation” as key reasons for the change, the Geneva based UN agency says that in the US alone, worker numbers slumped from a peak of 1.65 million workers in 1982 to roughly 640,000 by 2000.…

BY MARK ROWE
BMW has appointed a woman to head its Asian head office in Singapore, a move unprecedented in the history of the country. Birgit Maier is set to take up the position of managing director of BMW Asia in April, replacing the present chief, Felix Herrnberger.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
AN AUSTRALIAN company has made a breakthrough in developing insect-repellent clothing. In tests, cloth samples impregnated with a synthetic pyrethroid repellent killed most mosquitoes before they even touched the material.

Its manufacturing method applies the chemicals with the softeners onto the fabric and becomes part of the chemical finish on the treated textile.…