Aug 2011 Edition
REFUGEES
The UN defines a refugee as a person who flees their country due to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. There are an estimated 11-12 million refugees in the world today, a dramatic increase since the mid-1970s when there were less than three million. However it is a decrease since 1992 when the refugee population was nearly 28-million due to the Balkan conflicts Approximately 70 per cent of the world's refugee population is in Africa and the Middle East.
RESEARCH
A deal has been announced which will see Google and the British Library make available about 250,000 books. Internet users will be able to consult texts dating from 1700 to 1870 which have been digitalized by Google. The works are all out of copyright. The costs of digitalizing all 40-million pages have been borne by Google, which has entered into similar partnerships with Stanford and Harvard universities in the U.S., as well as in the Netherlands, Italy and Austria.
EMPLOYMENT
The Economist reports that the outlook for employment in the third quarter of this year is positive in 34 of the 39 countries and territories covered by Manpower, an employment-services company. At 47 percentage points, the net balance of employers expecting to increase the size of their workforce is highest in India. Along with Germany, Canada and Argentina, India is among the countries where the prospects are brightest. In Italy and Spain however, more employers say they intend to cut the size of their workforce than say they plan to augment it.
SITES
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has announced that websites will no longer be limited to endings such as .com or .org. There are now 22 top-level domains such as .net and .travel, and .com is the most popular with almost 26-million addresses. There are also 250 country-specific domains, such as .can and .uk. Non-Latin characters such as Arabic and Chinese will be allowed in domains for the first time.
BEER
The brewing of beer stretches back to the Bronze Age in China and the Middle East. Now, archaeologists have uncovered evidence that the occupants of southeastern France were brewing beer during the Iron Age, some 2,500 years ago. Barley grains have been found on a paved floor near an oven and hearth of a home dated to the 5th Century BC, and in a ceramic vessel and a pit that were near storage containers. Scientists speculate that the finds were part of a home-brew process that needs no specialized equipment.
WATERMELONS
A prized Japanese watermelon fetched nearly US$4,000 at auction recently. The rare Densuke watermelon, a solidly black, smooth-as-a-bowling ball gourd is lauded for its crispy texture and extra sweet fruit. Grown exclusively in Hokkaido, there are only about 65-70 of the stripeless watermelons available each year. The highest-ever price was in 2007 when one sold for $8,100. A average watermelon sells for about $30.
ELEVATORS
The 102-floor Empire State Building in New York is to upgrade its elevators. without disrupting its thousands of office workers and tourists that visit each day. The plan is to replace and modernize the building's 68 elevators to bring them into the computer age and reduce passenger wait times. The cost of the final renovation project which will include upgraded lighting, heating and cooling and other systems is about US$550-million. This is the biggest modernization in the building's 158-year history.
CIGARS
Production of Cuban cigars and tobacco leaf are on the rise after falling on hard times due to smoking bans and the international financial crisis. The dextrous fingers of Cuba's cigar makers rolled out 81.5-million of the sought after smokes last year compared with 75.4-million in 2009. But this is still well below the 100-million cigars which were exported in 2008. The partial recovery is due largely to a growing demand in Asia, particularly China, where the new rich are keen for the largest and most expensive cigars.
CHIPS
Driven by the success of the iPhone and iPad, Apple Inc. has now become the world's largest buyer of chips for computers and phones. Apple bought US$17.5-billion worth of chips last year surpassing computer maker Hewlett-Packard Co. as the largest consumer. This was an increase of 80 per cent from the year before, reflecting Apple's continuing sales surge. An iPhone contains about $80 worth of chips. Apple sold 48-million iPhones last year, up 89 per cent from the previous year. The next biggest buyers of chips were Samsung, Dell and Nokia.
ROYAL MAIL
Tens of thousands of Royal Mail workers in Britain face the threat of losing their jobs after the company reported a C$180-million loss in its letters and parcels business following a huge slump in the number of people using the post. Daily postal deliveries have fallen from 80-million pieces five years ago to 62-million, a decline of 20 per cent, with further declines of 5 per cent each year predicted. The number of mail centres is to drop from 64 at the start of this year to 32 over the next few years. Each centre employs from 500 to 1,000 workers.
CLOTHING
New research shows that the average British woman buys 62 pounds of clothing, or about half her body weight, in a single year. The growth of "fast fashion" which means "buy it, wear it and chuck it" has led women to buy four times as many clothes as they did 30 years ago. It also implies that they are also dumping a similar amount of clothing each year. The calculation of 62 pounds comes from studying textile imports.
SERVICE
A Consumer Reports survey indicates that Americans are fed up with poor customer service with 64 per cent walking out of stores due to poor assistance and 67 per cent hanging up on a call before their problems are even addressed. The most annoying complaint is not being able to get someone on the phone, followed by a rude salesperson.
GUTS
Some industrious companies have devised clever ways of taking the inedible parts of animals like cows, pigs and sheep and using them to make popular consumer items. One UK firm, collects cows' intestines by the bucketful from local abattoirs and turns them into the kind of natural gut strings favoured by many of the world's top tennis players. It takes about four cows' guts to string the average tennis racket. The process takes six weeks from start to finish but is worth it. With a synthetic string, once hit by a ball, it remains stretched but a gut always returns to its natural form.
CLOTHES
China still dominates the business, supplying nearly half of the European Union's garments imports and 41 per cent of America's. However, more orders are shifting to lower-wage economies such as Cambodia and Vietnam, where garment factories are mushrooming. Vietnam is already the second largest supplier of clothes to the U.S. They still have to import fabrics from China so their transport costs are high.
DISTRESS
A lifeboat was launched after a distress call was received four miles off the Welsh coast. After a three hour search for the SOS message, the signal was traced to an anti-theft device on a BMW on a cross-channel ferry.
RESERVES
According to the oil company BP, the world's known reserves of oil rose by 6.6-billion barrels during 2010, as increases in reserves in Brazil, India, Russia, Colombia, Uganda and Ghana outstripped declines in Mexico and Norway. This brought the amount of oil that could, in theory, be extracted under existing technological and economic conditions to 1.38-trillion barrels. Over half the world's reserves are in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia having just under a fifth of the global total. If China continues to pump out oil at the rate it did last year, its reserves will be exhausted in under a decade.
ROAMING
In a recent report issued by the OECD, Canada was found to have the highest data roaming fees out of all 34 countries surveyed. For IMb (megabyte) of data sent from a cellular roaming zone, less than the size of one high-resolution photograph, Canadians pay an average of US$24.61. That is more than double the overall average cost of $9.48 to transmit a single megabyte of data. That is more than five times the $4.17 per megabyte charged in Greece which has the lowest average roaming fees.
SEAS
Russia and Norway have agreed a deal to divide up their shares of the oil-rich Barents Sea. The accord will allow companies to explore for oil and gas in the 68,000 square mile area.The region has become more accessible recently as global warming has caused much of the ice to melt making significant exploration feasible for the first time. The US Geological survey estimated in 2008 that the Arctic was likely to hold 30 per cent of the world's recoverable, but yet to be discovered, gas and 13 per cent of its oil.
WINE
Exports are booming for California winemakers. Foreign shipments rebounded to a record US$1.14-billion in 2010, up 25.6 per cent from 2009. The previous Governor was a big grape crusader for the state appearing in TV ads and going on trade missions. The surge is also attributable to the economic recovery and favourable exchange rates that make the wine more affordable in key markets such as Canada, which accounts for about a quarter of foreign sales. Australia, a much smaller producer exports almost twice as much wine in dollar terms as the United States and even smaller New Zealand has been aggressive in foreign markets exporting about $800-million worth of wine, almost as much as California.
SUNSCREEN
By next year, help will be on the way for North American consumers who are confused by the maze of sun protection numbers and other claims on sunscreen. Staring next summer, bottles and tubes will carry the label "broad spectrum" which consumers can feel confident will lower their risk of skin cancer. These sunscreens will have to filter out the most dangerous types of radiation to claim they protect against cancer and premature aging.
WINDOW SHOPPING
Shoppers will soon be able to "try" on the latest fashions from the sidewalk outside some stores. Researchers in the UK are developing new technology that will recognize people from information stored on their cell phones as they walk by a store and will produce a life-size image of them on a screen outside, dressed in clothes from the store. The electronic likeness is created using body measurements that individual consumers have registered and asked for the information to be stored on the retailers central computer.
RENTAL
The Bloor Street shopping district in Toronto is the priciest in Canada at US$291.66 a square foot, making it the only Canadian city to make the global top 50. Saskatoon saw the biggest percentage jump last year with Broadway Avenue space rents up 25 per cent. The world's most expensive strip of storefronts is in New York, along Fifth Avenue, where a square foot of space rents for $2,150, almost $700 a foot more than the previous year. Hong Kong, London and Zurich are the next most expensive cities.
Thank you for reading the A & A Economic News Digest. For more information visit our website www.aacb.com or contact A & A Contract Customs Brokers Ltd. at strehler@aacb.com.
Past issues of the A&A Economic News Digest can be found at http://www.aacb.com/publications/ed/index.asp
The UN defines a refugee as a person who flees their country due to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. There are an estimated 11-12 million refugees in the world today, a dramatic increase since the mid-1970s when there were less than three million. However it is a decrease since 1992 when the refugee population was nearly 28-million due to the Balkan conflicts Approximately 70 per cent of the world's refugee population is in Africa and the Middle East.
RESEARCH
A deal has been announced which will see Google and the British Library make available about 250,000 books. Internet users will be able to consult texts dating from 1700 to 1870 which have been digitalized by Google. The works are all out of copyright. The costs of digitalizing all 40-million pages have been borne by Google, which has entered into similar partnerships with Stanford and Harvard universities in the U.S., as well as in the Netherlands, Italy and Austria.
EMPLOYMENT
The Economist reports that the outlook for employment in the third quarter of this year is positive in 34 of the 39 countries and territories covered by Manpower, an employment-services company. At 47 percentage points, the net balance of employers expecting to increase the size of their workforce is highest in India. Along with Germany, Canada and Argentina, India is among the countries where the prospects are brightest. In Italy and Spain however, more employers say they intend to cut the size of their workforce than say they plan to augment it.
SITES
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has announced that websites will no longer be limited to endings such as .com or .org. There are now 22 top-level domains such as .net and .travel, and .com is the most popular with almost 26-million addresses. There are also 250 country-specific domains, such as .can and .uk. Non-Latin characters such as Arabic and Chinese will be allowed in domains for the first time.
BEER
The brewing of beer stretches back to the Bronze Age in China and the Middle East. Now, archaeologists have uncovered evidence that the occupants of southeastern France were brewing beer during the Iron Age, some 2,500 years ago. Barley grains have been found on a paved floor near an oven and hearth of a home dated to the 5th Century BC, and in a ceramic vessel and a pit that were near storage containers. Scientists speculate that the finds were part of a home-brew process that needs no specialized equipment.
WATERMELONS
A prized Japanese watermelon fetched nearly US$4,000 at auction recently. The rare Densuke watermelon, a solidly black, smooth-as-a-bowling ball gourd is lauded for its crispy texture and extra sweet fruit. Grown exclusively in Hokkaido, there are only about 65-70 of the stripeless watermelons available each year. The highest-ever price was in 2007 when one sold for $8,100. A average watermelon sells for about $30.
ELEVATORS
The 102-floor Empire State Building in New York is to upgrade its elevators. without disrupting its thousands of office workers and tourists that visit each day. The plan is to replace and modernize the building's 68 elevators to bring them into the computer age and reduce passenger wait times. The cost of the final renovation project which will include upgraded lighting, heating and cooling and other systems is about US$550-million. This is the biggest modernization in the building's 158-year history.
CIGARS
Production of Cuban cigars and tobacco leaf are on the rise after falling on hard times due to smoking bans and the international financial crisis. The dextrous fingers of Cuba's cigar makers rolled out 81.5-million of the sought after smokes last year compared with 75.4-million in 2009. But this is still well below the 100-million cigars which were exported in 2008. The partial recovery is due largely to a growing demand in Asia, particularly China, where the new rich are keen for the largest and most expensive cigars.
CHIPS
Driven by the success of the iPhone and iPad, Apple Inc. has now become the world's largest buyer of chips for computers and phones. Apple bought US$17.5-billion worth of chips last year surpassing computer maker Hewlett-Packard Co. as the largest consumer. This was an increase of 80 per cent from the year before, reflecting Apple's continuing sales surge. An iPhone contains about $80 worth of chips. Apple sold 48-million iPhones last year, up 89 per cent from the previous year. The next biggest buyers of chips were Samsung, Dell and Nokia.
ROYAL MAIL
Tens of thousands of Royal Mail workers in Britain face the threat of losing their jobs after the company reported a C$180-million loss in its letters and parcels business following a huge slump in the number of people using the post. Daily postal deliveries have fallen from 80-million pieces five years ago to 62-million, a decline of 20 per cent, with further declines of 5 per cent each year predicted. The number of mail centres is to drop from 64 at the start of this year to 32 over the next few years. Each centre employs from 500 to 1,000 workers.
CLOTHING
New research shows that the average British woman buys 62 pounds of clothing, or about half her body weight, in a single year. The growth of "fast fashion" which means "buy it, wear it and chuck it" has led women to buy four times as many clothes as they did 30 years ago. It also implies that they are also dumping a similar amount of clothing each year. The calculation of 62 pounds comes from studying textile imports.
SERVICE
A Consumer Reports survey indicates that Americans are fed up with poor customer service with 64 per cent walking out of stores due to poor assistance and 67 per cent hanging up on a call before their problems are even addressed. The most annoying complaint is not being able to get someone on the phone, followed by a rude salesperson.
GUTS
Some industrious companies have devised clever ways of taking the inedible parts of animals like cows, pigs and sheep and using them to make popular consumer items. One UK firm, collects cows' intestines by the bucketful from local abattoirs and turns them into the kind of natural gut strings favoured by many of the world's top tennis players. It takes about four cows' guts to string the average tennis racket. The process takes six weeks from start to finish but is worth it. With a synthetic string, once hit by a ball, it remains stretched but a gut always returns to its natural form.
CLOTHES
China still dominates the business, supplying nearly half of the European Union's garments imports and 41 per cent of America's. However, more orders are shifting to lower-wage economies such as Cambodia and Vietnam, where garment factories are mushrooming. Vietnam is already the second largest supplier of clothes to the U.S. They still have to import fabrics from China so their transport costs are high.
DISTRESS
A lifeboat was launched after a distress call was received four miles off the Welsh coast. After a three hour search for the SOS message, the signal was traced to an anti-theft device on a BMW on a cross-channel ferry.
RESERVES
According to the oil company BP, the world's known reserves of oil rose by 6.6-billion barrels during 2010, as increases in reserves in Brazil, India, Russia, Colombia, Uganda and Ghana outstripped declines in Mexico and Norway. This brought the amount of oil that could, in theory, be extracted under existing technological and economic conditions to 1.38-trillion barrels. Over half the world's reserves are in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia having just under a fifth of the global total. If China continues to pump out oil at the rate it did last year, its reserves will be exhausted in under a decade.
ROAMING
In a recent report issued by the OECD, Canada was found to have the highest data roaming fees out of all 34 countries surveyed. For IMb (megabyte) of data sent from a cellular roaming zone, less than the size of one high-resolution photograph, Canadians pay an average of US$24.61. That is more than double the overall average cost of $9.48 to transmit a single megabyte of data. That is more than five times the $4.17 per megabyte charged in Greece which has the lowest average roaming fees.
SEAS
Russia and Norway have agreed a deal to divide up their shares of the oil-rich Barents Sea. The accord will allow companies to explore for oil and gas in the 68,000 square mile area.The region has become more accessible recently as global warming has caused much of the ice to melt making significant exploration feasible for the first time. The US Geological survey estimated in 2008 that the Arctic was likely to hold 30 per cent of the world's recoverable, but yet to be discovered, gas and 13 per cent of its oil.
WINE
Exports are booming for California winemakers. Foreign shipments rebounded to a record US$1.14-billion in 2010, up 25.6 per cent from 2009. The previous Governor was a big grape crusader for the state appearing in TV ads and going on trade missions. The surge is also attributable to the economic recovery and favourable exchange rates that make the wine more affordable in key markets such as Canada, which accounts for about a quarter of foreign sales. Australia, a much smaller producer exports almost twice as much wine in dollar terms as the United States and even smaller New Zealand has been aggressive in foreign markets exporting about $800-million worth of wine, almost as much as California.
SUNSCREEN
By next year, help will be on the way for North American consumers who are confused by the maze of sun protection numbers and other claims on sunscreen. Staring next summer, bottles and tubes will carry the label "broad spectrum" which consumers can feel confident will lower their risk of skin cancer. These sunscreens will have to filter out the most dangerous types of radiation to claim they protect against cancer and premature aging.
WINDOW SHOPPING
Shoppers will soon be able to "try" on the latest fashions from the sidewalk outside some stores. Researchers in the UK are developing new technology that will recognize people from information stored on their cell phones as they walk by a store and will produce a life-size image of them on a screen outside, dressed in clothes from the store. The electronic likeness is created using body measurements that individual consumers have registered and asked for the information to be stored on the retailers central computer.
RENTAL
The Bloor Street shopping district in Toronto is the priciest in Canada at US$291.66 a square foot, making it the only Canadian city to make the global top 50. Saskatoon saw the biggest percentage jump last year with Broadway Avenue space rents up 25 per cent. The world's most expensive strip of storefronts is in New York, along Fifth Avenue, where a square foot of space rents for $2,150, almost $700 a foot more than the previous year. Hong Kong, London and Zurich are the next most expensive cities.
Thank you for reading the A & A Economic News Digest. For more information visit our website www.aacb.com or contact A & A Contract Customs Brokers Ltd. at strehler@aacb.com.
Past issues of the A&A Economic News Digest can be found at http://www.aacb.com/publications/ed/index.asp
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