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/ 11 November 2005
Fears were growing this week that the crucial meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Hong Kong next month is heading for failure after Brazil and India warned that the gulf between negotiators was too big to bridge in the five weeks left for the talks. The leading developing countries said the mid-December deadline for an outline deal to liberalise trade was too soon and that there might have to be a delay or a scaling-back of ambition for the round launched four years ago.
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/ 28 September 2005
China’s explosive rise to economic superpower status was confirmed by the West’s leading think tank recently, in a new report predicting that the Asian nation would leapfrog the United States and Germany within five years to become the world’s biggest exporter. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said there would be no let-up in the country’s breakneck growth.
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/ 24 September 2005
Looking back, it is clear when the tide turned on Britain’s year for Africa. The four bombs in the London rush hour on the morning of July 7 marked the high water mark of the West’s cooperation on development and things have never been quite the same since. The terrorists timed their attacks to coincide with the G8 Gleneagles summit.
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/ 13 September 2005
The United Nations has warned British Finance Minister Gordon Brown in Labour’s third term he will have to levy taxes on the better-off if the government is to meet its ambitious goal of halving child poverty by 2010. In its flagship annual study charting progress in tackling poverty, the UN highlights Britain as a country where inequality has put the brake on development.
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/ 6 September 2005
As someone who has spent the best part of 20 years covering global trade talks, I know from bitter experience that it takes a lot to elevate tariffs, quotas and subsidies on to the front page. Recently, however, reports that there are shiploads of ladies’ underwear lurking on the borders of the EU, due to a decision to limit imports from China, have elevated trade to the lead item on the BBC news.
Western governments heard a faint echo from the 1970s recently as the escalating cost of petrol contributed to higher inflation. And with tension in the Middle East providing another reminder of life three decades ago, the message was that consumers can expect more of the same over the coming months.
Rich Western countries spend up to 25 times as much on defence as they do on overseas aid and have increased their assistance to the poorest African countries by just a head since 1990, according to United Nations figures. Research to be shows that every country in Western Europe and North America has a bigger military budget than overseas development budget.
It was a question of when not if for oil traders on Tuesday as the price of a barrel of crude threatened to burst through the -a-barrel barrier for the first time. News that the North Sea Forties oil field had been shut because of technical problems pushed an already jittery market, which has jumped 11% in the past week alone, to a new record high of ,55 for US light crude.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown was on Wednesday finalising the details of a new deal to wipe out the multilateral debts of Africa’s poorest countries after British Prime Minister Tony Blair won agreement in principle from United States President George W Bush on Tuesday in Washington.
From the moment it was clear that Labour was on course for a third election victory, the political class shifted to the real issue: when will Gordon Brown succeed Tony Blair as prime minister? Equally inevitably, attention will turn to what sort of prime minister Brown will make. Will he shift the emphasis from the centre to the centre left, governing from a more traditional Labour stance?