Search Results for: Germany

BY ALAN OSBORN

FACT BOX

Population of Iceland: 300,000

Number of students enrolled at university: 9,526

Percentage of university students who are Icelanders: 93%

Percentage of Icelandic population attending university: 5.8%

INTERVIEW

A LOT of people are fascinated by Iceland and it’s helped make the country’s university something of a lure for students across Europe and even America.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A PRACTICAL and regional initiative to remove barriers in trading electricity between neighbouring European Union (EU) countries has been launched by the European Regulators’ Group for Electricity and Gas (ERGEG). It is grouping states’ regulators and utilities together to focus on regulatory and technical difficulties impeding cross-border sales of electricity for countries sharing frontiers.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

FACT BOX

Population: approx. 35,000

Number of students at the university: about 840

Percentage of its students who are Liechtensteiners: about 85%

Percentage of Liechtensteiners who attend university: about 30%

INTERVIEW

IT says something about the University of Liechtenstein that most of its masters programmes are taught in English even though the inhabitants of this tiny Alpine principality speak German and the country itself is sandwiched between Switzerland and Austria.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

BRITAIN’S status as a low tax jurisdiction in the European Union (EU) has been reconfirmed in the latest comparative study of developed industrialised countries by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). For instance, looking at income tax and national insurance burdens for single people without children, Britain is taxed at 33.5% on average, compared with an old 15-member EU average of 42.1%.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

The European Investment Bank is providing EUR 137 million to the German steel company Huttenwerke Krupp Mannesmann for the extension of a coking plant at Duisburg-Huckingen. The EIB loan will cover about half the total cost of the project which will raise the plant’s capacity from 1.1 to 2.2 million tonnes a year in order to meet demand from the steel works.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

The European Commission has published a set of recommendations designed to make it easier for economically sound small and medium-sized businesses to change ownership. Brussels estimates that a third of EU entrepreneurs will retire through old age within the next ten years.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE, in Sydney

IN the rapidly expanding world of nanotechnology (a nano is one billionth of a metre), more and more applications for the adhesives industry are being developed. Many of these inventions are sophisticated, even futuristic in scope, although bizarrely some advances are linked to natural phenomena, with the sector owing a lot of the latest groundbreaking research to the humble gecko.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE MULTILATERAL Investment Guarantee Agency, or MIGA, is the international organisation companies turn to when they want to invest in a jurisdiction where their assets might not be that safe. Non-ferrous metal miners and processors use MIGA to cover risks that are too tough for the private insurance industry.…

BY JANE MOIR, in Hong Kong

CONSTRUCTION is on the up, people are eagerly buying homes, cars are being churned out at a rapid pace and the 2008 Beijing Olympics are just around the corner. The demand for paint and coatings in China should never have been better.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) industrial minerals sector is being asked whether it wants the EU’s construction products directive liberalised, so member states allow the sale of building materials approved for use in other EU countries. The public consultation follows long criticism levelled at the 1989 legislation, which calls for rigid European CE standards for products such as thermal insulating products, cement, roofing products or façades.…