Search Results for: World Trade Organisation

BY PHILIP FINE

IN its comprehensive annual report on worldwide drugs activities, the US

government is asking foreign countries to be more transparent with information on

their legal chemical industries that might be useful in controlling the production and trade in illicit drug precursors.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
A LOT of people are saying that cigar smoking may be in serious long-term decline given the way things are going in America. World Tobacco is inclined to treat the figures a little more cautiously. It is true there has almost certainly been a sharp drop in American consumption in recent years but, as Chris Boon, the premium cigar manager at British American Tobacco, points out, there are no true figures: “you draw own conclusions and arrive at an estimate.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FINNISH lawyers are the most lightly regulated in the European Union (EU), according to the surprising results of a European Commission-funded survey designed to promote the need for liberalisation in Europe’s liberal professions. Oddly, Greece, not known for its adherence to EU rules, has the union’s most heavily regulated legal profession; under a statistical indices developed by the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, Greece has a regulation burden of 9.5, while the laissez-faire Finns score a tiny 0.3.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction and Development is talking closely to concerned environmental groups before agreeing to release US$300 million to build the planned key Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil and gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
STREAMLINING, multi-tasking and flexible posting of employees may be important weapons in the arsenal of a personnel team looking at getting the most efficiency out of their company, but managers had better make sure that their policies are legal, not only under national laws, but European law too.…

BY RICHARD HURST
THE WORLD Bank and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) have agreed to fund a US$55.77 million environmental management programme in Zambia’s copper mining region. The Copperbelt Environmental Project (CEP) will try to improve the compliance of Zambian copper producers with the country’s environmental regulations.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
TOBACCO companies, trade unions and governments have agreed that employment in the tobacco sector “needs to be reviewed in terms of recent economic and social developments.” The three sides, meeting under the auspices of the International Labour Organisation in Geneva last month (February), accepted that the sector’s jobs in industrialised countries and some developing countries “have either been stagnating or declining, although tobacco production, especially cigarettes, has been increasing due to higher demand worldwide supported by state-of-the-art technology and corporate consolidation.”…

BY PHILIP FINE

THE EXTRAORDINARY efforts by the American government to thwart terrorist financing have been leaning heavily on the USA’s financial services industry,

which continues to bear the brunt of the new anti-money laundering legislation.

Noone was surprised that the US government set its sights on the banks when it enacted legislation to make it more difficult for criminals to launder their illicit money or for terrorists to soil their clean money.…

BY MARK ROWE
SINGAPORE is to set up what it is hailing as the world’s first specialist retailing school. The Retail Academy of Singapore will aim to improve local standards by offering up to 23,000 shop and store staff courses on consumer behaviour, merchandising, management, fashion, food, supermarket economies of scale and information technology.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UN Food and Agricultural Organisation has released a series of papers on genetically modified food, with a memorandum on fish highlighting the significant commercial opportunities to fish farmers, but also the potential dire environmental after effects of escapes by GM fish.…