International News

  Bloomberg In just a decade, Russia has transformed its sugar industry. The country, which was once the world’s top importer of raw sweetener, is now on the verge of becoming a net exporter. Aided by an import tax Russia introduced in 2004 to shield domestic firms from foreign competition, producers have been able to invest in making beet refining ...

  Bloomberg Forget about Donald Trump. The global reflation trade may have another driver that proves to be more durable: China’s rebounding factory prices. The producer price index has staged an 10 percentage-point turnaround in the past 10 months, posting for January a 6.9 percent jump from a year earlier. Though much of that reflects a rebound in commodity prices ...

  Bloomberg A panel of state finance ministers cleared a bill that will compensate states for any revenue lost as a new nationwide goods and services tax is introduced in July. The government will now present the compensation bill in the second phase of the parliament’s budget session, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told reporters in the northwestern city of Udaipur ...

TOKYO / AP Japan’s economy expanded at a steadily slowing pace in 2016, though a modest recovery in exports helped offset sluggish spending by households and businesses, according to data reported. The 1.0 percent annual pace of expansion for the year compared with 1.2 percent growth in 2015. For all but one quarter of the year, private demand was flat ...

  Bloomberg Mongolia reached an initial agreement with the International Monetary Fund for a three-year program that includes a $440 million loan package as part of a $5.5 billion bailout to help the north Asian country with looming debt repayments. “The Asian Development Bank, the World Bank and bilateral partners including Japan and Korea are expected to provide up to ...

  Bloomberg China’s securities regulator announced new curbs on how much and often the country’s public companies can issue new shares, amid concerns that a faster pace of initial public offerings will drag down the stock market. The number of shares issued in private placements can’t be more than 20 percent of a company’s total shares, the China Securities Regulatory ...

  Bloomberg Billionaire Richard Li’s PCCW Ltd. plans to sell a HK$8.53 billion ($1.1 billion) stake in telecommunications unit HKT Trust & HKT Ltd., amassing cash as the Hong Kong tycoon shifts into greater media investments. The shares of both companies fell. PCCW will sell 840.7 million shares of Hong Kong’s largest phone company for HK$10.15 apiece, it said in ...

  Bloomberg Singapore’s government has a message for anyone expecting great things following Friday’s surprise growth bounce: don’t hold your breath. The city-state’s economy will still only expand between 1 percent and 3 percent this year, policy makers said after fourth-quarter growth burst in at an annualized 12.3 percent — the fastest pace in more than five years. They had ...

  Bloomberg The Trump administration has quietly consulted technology industry leaders ahead of issuing a delayed executive order on cybersecurity, even as executives have clashed with the White House over policies including the president’s efforts to limit entry to the US. President Donald Trump delayed the signing of a cybersecurity directive that had been planned for January 31 just as ...

  Bloomberg UK unemployment declined and a measure of the number of people in work rose to a record, pushing the labor market closer to “full capacity,” according to the statistics office. The number of jobless fell 7,000 in the fourth quarter to 1.6 million people, leaving the unemployment rate at 4.8 percent, the lowest in more than a decade. ...