The world’s central banks are “pretty close” to the limits of their ability to stimulate economies, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Secretary-General Angel Gurria said on Saturday.
In the absence of “breakthrough, collective” policies, global growth is likely to remain weak, Gurria said in an interview with Reuters ahead of a meeting of leaders of the world’s 20 biggest economies, the G20, in the Chinese city of Hangzhou.
“We have left our good central bankers to do all the heavy lifting,” Gurria said. “It has to be like a relay. Continued accommodative monetary policy, and then you get to the second relay like in the four-by-100s and the baton passes.”
“Now you need to get it to the finance ministers, to the economy ministers, to the trade ministers, to the technology ministers, the science ministers, the education ministers, the competition ministers. Now is the big time for structural change,” he said.
Echoing remarks by Chinese deputy minister of finance on Friday, Gurria said that a combination of coordinated monetary, fiscal and structural adjustment policies are necessary to revive growth worldwide, including in China.
However, he was relatively upbeat on the outlook for China’s growth, despite a rising debt burden and mixed progress on tackling low efficiency and overcapacity in key state-owned sectors.
Gurria said that China likely could continue growing at about 6.5 to 7 percent during its five-year plan period to 2020 without major distortions in the structure of the economy.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday said that China had the confidence and ability to maintain a medium-to-high rate of economic growth as it undergoes reform, and it would honor its commitments to cut overcapacity with action.
Speaking to a business forum on the eve of the G20 summit, Xi said the G20 should combine monetary and fiscal policies with structural reforms to promote growth, and warned that isolationism could not resolve problems faced by the global economy.
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],”
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
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