It’s no secret that Kazakhstan’s economy has suffered in the past year. The global fall in oil prices is the most important factor, but the failure of the Eurasian Economic Union to stimulate trade among members has helped deepen the hole. Persistent tension between Europe and Russia hasn’t helped the fledgling EEU. European countries still account for almost half of ...

On the sidelines of a G20 conference in Shanghai last week, Indonesian finance minister Bambang Brodjonegoro said in a Reuters interview that he is willing to exceed the 2015 budget deficit. These comments were certainly calculated to reassure investors and concerned observers at a time when the global engines of growth are slowing, most notably China, taking its toll on ...

Bloomberg Fortress Investment Group LLC is betting that one of the real estate industry’s greatest contrarian wagers has more room to run. The manager of $70.5 billion, which piled into Japanese property after a tsunami and nuclear meltdown battered valuations in 2011, has seen its investments surge after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s stimulus revitalized the industry. Invincible Investment Corp., a ...

Bloomberg Milan and Rome were the best and worst major Italian cities for home sales last year, revealing a widening economic gap between the country’s capital and its financial center. Residential transactions jumped 13.4 percent in Milan last year, while sales in Rome increased 0.8 percent, according to data released by the Ministry of Economy. Sales nationally picked up 6.5 ...

Bloomberg As forest fires shrouded Singapore in a blanket haze last year, CBRE Group Inc.’s Lloyd Jenkins, sat down with a group of high-level property investors at the city state’s five-star Fullerton Hotel and showed them pictures of white beaches and clear, blue skies. This is Perth, he said, and there’s a lot of opportunity. Jenkins, managing director at CBRE ...

Bloomberg It has become an article of faith among education reformers that throwing more money at public education doesn’t improve student performance. But a steady drumbeat of careful research studies is calling this into question. What if more money really does work? The case against spending more on schools comes in two basic forms. One is to look at various ...

Bloomberg According to an employment report, 59.8 percent of Americans aged 16 and older had jobs in February. That’s the highest employment-to-population ratio in years, and the rate of increase is clearly on the rise. Look back some more years, though, and the story is different. The recent gains are real, but by the standards of the past few decades, ...

Washington / AFP Google has announced that it would implement changes in how it applies the so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ for online searches made in Europe. The changes, to be implemented next week, would close a loophole that allowed Europeans to find deleted entries by using Google.com instead of the search page for their local country. “Starting next week, ...

SAN FRANCISCO / AP Amazon.com is introducing two devices designed to amplify the role its voice-controlled assistant Alexa plays in people’s homes and lives. The products are echoes of Amazon’s Echo, a cylinder-shaped speaker with Internet-connected microphones that became Alexa’s first major showcase when it debuted in late 2014. Set these gadgets up and they’ll listen for your voice and ...

Relaxnews According to ABI Research, this year’s Mobile World Congress proved the perfect springboard for showcasing virtual reality, so much so that the company is now predicting that 50 million headsets will be shipped globally every year by the end of the decade, including devices that work with a smartphone. The most basic virtual reality design, Google’s Cardboard, has already ...