EU authorities on Friday gave Belgium, France and Italy three more months to bring their budgets in line with legal requirements.
The decision is a sign that the new European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, under Jean-Claude Juncker would be sensitive to calls to ease up on austerity in Europe — particularly in the eurozone, where growth has sputtered and unemployment remains stubbornly high.
“We will decide in early March whether any further steps are necessary under the Stability and Growth Pact,” European Commissioner for Economic Affairs Pierre Moscovici said, referring to the bloc’s fiscal rule book.
In an accompanying statement, the commission said that Belgium, France and Italy were at risk of running afoul of fiscal rules. However, the authorities in all three nations had “committed at the highest level of government” to put in place by early next year overhauls that would eventually help shore up their public finances, it said.
The verdict for France could have been far more severe. The nation has repeatedly missed the bloc’s requirement that budget deficits not exceed 3 percent of GDP, and it is on course for another violation next year, when it expects the deficit to be above 4 percent of GDP. The French government has warned that it is unlikely to meet the deficit requirement before 2017.
That budgetary record could have led the commission to recommend penalizing France under rules that were toughened after the financial crisis in Europe threatened the euro.
The commission could still issue a recommendation to fine France 0.2 percent of its GDP as soon as next spring, European officials said on Friday. The commission was keeping “all options” open for dealing with rule breakers, said Valdis Dombrovskis, a vice president at the European Commission who helps assess annual budgets to see if they are in compliance.
Italy is already broadly in line with the bloc’s deficit rules, but it has a national debt that is far above the EU target of 60 percent of GDP. It could still be put into a special procedure that could lead to fines.
In the case of Belgium, the commission called on Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel’s administration to specify the structural overhauls it plans to put in place before the nation faces its next serious examination by the European authorities, in March next year.
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],”
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained
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