Search Results for: World Trade Organisation

Times might be tough in Italy, with annual inflation at 9.4% (in September) and sluggish growth of 2.5% projected for 2022 (OECD data), but Italians are drinking more coffee, including supermarket sales for home-brewed drinks.

In 2021, Italian roasted mass market retail coffee sales exceeded EUR1.3 billion overall, said IRI, up 1.1% year-on-year, driven by the single-serving pods and capsules and grains segments.…

Enforcement action to tackle foreign bribery in compliance with the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention (1) declined from 2018 to 2021, according to Transparency International (TI), after reviewing 47 leading export economies. These were 43 convention signatories plus China, India, Hong Kong and Singapore.…

British banking trade association UK Finance is warning that “the level of fraud in the UK has reached a point where it must be considered a national security threat”. In its ‘2022 half year fraud update’ (1), it said that despite spending billions on fraud prevention, “the banking sector cannot solve this on its own.”…

More than 60% of police officers surveyed worldwide ranked crimes such as money laundering, ransomware, phishing and online frauds as high or very high threats, in Interpol’s first-ever Global Crime Trend report (1). Furthermore, more than 70% expect crimes such as ransomware and phishing attacks to increase or significantly increase over the next three to five years.…

 
The European Union’s garment and textile industry pushed this Thursday, October 13, in Oporto, Portugal, for global rules to fight climate change to ensure fair competitiveness, with more international harmonisation of sustainable standards.
These wishes were expressed in the conference ‘Sustainability meets Competitiveness – how to square the circle?’,…

The Chinese infant formula industry will hit a regulatory milestone in February (2023) with the introduction of new national standards first published last year (2021) by the country’s National Health Commission. These standards, including GB10765-2021 (1) promise to make labelling “more scientific”, thus improving quality of products.…

In early September (2022), Serbia faced a serious domestic milk crisis, with empty or half-empty store shelves, with consumers relying significantly on imports of foreign milk from Poland and the Czech Republic. The domestic supply squeeze was not a surprise for Serbia’s dairy farmers, however.…

In recent years, Iranians have been driving growth in the Middle East’s cosmetics market, but worsening economic and political developments in Iran have restricted this growth. That has not deterred some personal care product companies, however, who continue to prosper in the country, whose market of 84 million people has significant potential.…

Dulles International Airport, serving the US capital of Washington DC, is set to join a growing number of American airports that are putting the grassy territory around their runways to use producing solar energy. Planners of Dulles’ proposed solar farm and storage facility hope to lay claim to being the largest such airport-based project in the US.…

The Spanish can market and industry, which has developed an international reputation for its dominant fish canning sector, is increasingly innovative, driven by contemporary trends in its beverage sector, with sales of canned water and wine joining a promising market which has traditionally been based on beer.…