Australia needs to find “substantial savings” in its budget scheduled for May 8 as a result of a cumulative A$150 billion (US$156 billion) writedown in expected tax revenues over the past four years, Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan said yesterday.
Returning the budget to surplus in the year through June next year would be “that much harder” for Canberra as a result of cuts in tax revenues which are expected to reduce by A$5 billion the budget that year and again in the year through June 2014, Swan said in a weekly economic note.
“Our savings will be targeted and responsible, charting a middle course between those who say take a chainsaw to government spending and those who say we should not cut at all,” he said in an e-mailed statement.
Taxes would amount to 22.8 percent of GDP over the two years starting in July next year, compared with 24.2 percent during the first stage of the country’s mining boom in the middle of the last decade, he said.
A surplus would give “flexibility” to the Reserve Bank of Australia to cut interest rates “if the independent board thinks that is required,” Swan said.
The central bank is expected to make the first cut to official borrowing costs in five months at a meeting tomorrow, with 16 out of 28 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg forecasting interest rates cuts of 0.5 percentage points over the next two months.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day