Search Results for: International business

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed an up-dating of the EU’s “dual-use” regulation which controls the export by Member States of certain products and technologies sold to legitimate customers but which could be used for unlawful purposes. The list, which runs to more than 200 pages, covers a range of nuclear materials, facilities and equipment ranging from reactors to computer software and including natural or depleted uranium, plants designed for the fabrication of nuclear reactor fuel elements and test, inspection and production equipment.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Union Council of Ministers has authorised the European Commission to open negotiations on renewing two international textile trade agreements. These are the existing textile commerce accord with Laos and also the memorandum of agreement on textile products with Egypt.…

Keith Nuthall
TECHNICAL specialists on the manufacture of shoes, hats and umbrellas have struck, or are nearing, agreement, on the establishment of international rules of origin for these fashion accessories; these would state the degree of processing required for their components to be collectively considered a new product.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED States has lost a disputes panel case at the World Trade Organisation over definitive safeguard duties that it had imposed on imports of circular welded carbon quality line pipe from South Korea.

Although the panel rejected a number of South Korean complaints, it upheld enough of them to conclude that the US should “bring its safeguard measure into conformity with its WTO obligations.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
IT was telling that the first step taken by President Bush against Islamic terror groups following the World Trade Centre disaster was to freeze bank accounts. The international community has now responded by agreeing common controls to stop terror groups laundering funds.…

BY MARK ROWE and BEATA PLONKA
THE CENTRAL European Air Traffic Services (CEATS) project, first tentatively suggested back in the early 1990s, is intended to radically redraw the aviation map of the region. The project aims to provide a significant boost to the airspace capacity of what many commentators call eastern Europe and address the main challenges facing aviation in the 21st century; safety, delays and rising volumes of traffic.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A GLOOMY report from the World Trade Organisation has concluded that the growth in global commerce has fallen steeply and is now expected to reach just two per cent, compared with much healthier estimates at the start of the year and a 12 per cent boom in the year 2000.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Parliament has amended the proposed EU directive on the exposure of workers to mechanical vibrations, cutting the time that mines would have to introduce new maximum levels from six years to five. MEP’s also voted to tighten the limits supported by the EU Council of Ministers so that they corresponded to international standards.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Trade Organisation has launched a general round at its summit in Qatar, which will include negotiations on liberalising export and import regimes for so-called industrial goods such as fish.

These talks have a final deadline of 2005 and, said the meeting’s communiqué, will try “to reduce or as appropriate eliminate tariffs, including the reduction or elimination of tariff peaks, high tariffs, and tariff escalation, as well as non-tariff barriers, in particular on products of export interest to developing countries.”…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE DEVELOPMENT of safe, trouble-free and cheap air travel in Europe rests on a nexus of co-operation between countries made possible by the existence of the European Civil Aviation Conference. As the only Europe-wide organisation with the membership and expertise capable of responding to the increasingly complex needs of the European air transport industry, ECAC can, in a real sense, claim to be the representative voice of pan-European civil aviation.…