As finance ministers from the world's richest countries gathered in London on Friday, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown said he believed they could make progress toward "the biggest debt settlement the world has ever seen," a plan to erase billions of dollars owed by the world's poorest countries to international lenders.
But other participants at the gathering adopted a more muted view, hinting that some nations may still need to be won over before endorsing the landmark formula for debt relief that the US and UK agreed on this week. In Washington, the White House officially announced the agreement on Friday.
Treasury Secretary John Snow of the US and Brown are among the finance chiefs from the Group of Eight industrialized nations meeting for two days in London in advance of next month's Group of Eight summit meeting in Scotland.
"Much is still to be done, but I think there is a will to do this," Brown said Friday in a radio interview, referring to the plan to free 18 nations, most of them in Africa, from obligations to repay an estimated US$16.7 billion in debt to foreign lenders.
As this year's head of the Group of Eight, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has put the effort to relieve Africa's poverty and ease its debt burden at the head of an agenda that includes curbing global warming.
A breakthrough on the debt issue would enhance his position as he prepares for what is likely to be a contentious summit meeting at a time of deepening strains between the UK and its EU partners.
But it was not clear whether all Group of Eight members accepted the debt-relief plan. Besides the US and UK, the members are France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia.
Arriving in London, for instance, Caio Koch-Weser, Germany's deputy finance minister, said: "I can only say we are working on it."
Romilly Greenhill, a policy specialist with ActionAid International, an advocacy group based in South Africa, said the agreement had not yet won universal approval.
"France, Germany and to a lesser extent Japan are holding back," Greenhill said, because of concerns about the cost of compensating the lenders for the assets they would have to write off. Initially, she said, those countries had favored extending more limited debt relief to only the five poorest countries.
"It's by no means 100 percent certain" that the talks here will produce an agreement, she said. Additionally, the Group of Eight may wish to wait until it meets to announce an agreement with greater fanfare, she said.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Starlux Airlines Co (星宇航空) today unveiled a long-haul network expansion plan at a shareholders’ meeting in Taipei, including direct flights to Barcelona, Spain, and Zurich, Switzerland, as well as a service connecting Taipei, Sydney and New Zealand. Starlux is to become the first Taiwanese carrier to offer non-stop services to the two European cities, while the inaugural oceanic route is expected to expand transit opportunities within the Australia-New Zealand market, Starlux said. Flight services to Chicago, Dallas, Washington and New York are under evaluation, the airline added. Prior to the shareholders’ meeting, the airline earlier this year announced that it would be
Taiwanese prosecutors suspect that three people successfully smuggled at least one shipment of Nvidia Corp artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China after first exporting them to Japan, people familiar with the matter said. The trio was detained last week by the Keelung District Prosecutors’ Office for allegedly falsifying documents related to exports of Super Micro Computer Inc servers containing advanced Nvidia chips, which the US has barred from sale to China without a license from Washington. The move marked Taiwan’s first public crackdown on AI chip diversion after years of pressure from the US to take a more active role in curtailing
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) employee bonuses are likely to grow more than 30 percent this year, in line with the past few years as the company’s profits continue to set new records, an anonymous source cited TSMC chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家) as saying yesterday. TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, is committed to taking care of its workers, the source said, citing Wei’s meeting with employees yesterday morning. Wei also expressed gratitude to employees for their contribution to the company’s improving bottom line, the source added. Since 2023, TSMC’s employee bonuses have grown at an annual rate of
RSS