News about FTAs

 

* Australia signs FTA with Japan

 

Japan and Australia signed a historic free trade agreement.

 

Read more here.

 

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* South Korea & Australia Inked FTA

 

South Korea and Australia signed a comprehensive, high level FTA as per their comments.

 

Check here for more.

 

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* Mexico & Panama – FTA

 

Mexico and Panama signed a free trade agreement (FTA). Panama’s desire is to join latter to the Pacific Alliance (PA) trade bloc.

 

Read more here.

 

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* Mercosur & EFTA to Start FTA Talks

 

EFTA (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland) and Mercosur member states (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela) will start discussions on a free trade agreement (FTA) in the coming months.

 

Find more following the link.

 

 

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EU’s New Scheme for GSP Tariffs

 

The European Union (EU) amended its scheme of Generalized Tariff Preferences (GSP) for developing countries.

 

The EU GSP grants trade preferences for developing countries’ exports to the EU will be removed for EU imports from countries on the World Bank’s higher or upper middle per capita income list (including Russia, Brazil, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar).

 

More here.

 

Brazil Signing Currency Swap Agreements with All BRICS

 

Brazil and China have signed a Currency Swap Agreement in order to pay for trade transactions in local currencies (the real and the yuan or renminbi).

 

Furthermore, Brazil revealed that similar currency swap agreements were under study with all the members of the BRICS group of nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).

 

On the other side, China have signed similar agreements with Australia, Hong Kong and Japan.

 

The European Union and the BRIC Countries Statistics

31 May 2012

 

The four BRIC Countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and  Eurostat (the statistical office of the EU) releases the publication “The European Union and the BRIC Countries”.

 

The publication contains data on demography, economy, health, education, labour market, trade in goods, agriculture, energy and environment, transport and communication as well as science and technology.

 

For further information please refer to EU’s website.

 

New OECD Members

12 May 2010, Brussels

 

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has agreed to invite Estonia, Israel and Slovenia to become members of the Organisation, its membership will grow to 34 countries.

 

Before the admission, the three countries were reviewed by several commissions with respect to their compliance with OECD standards and benchmarks.

 

The last country to became member was Chile earlier this year and membership talks with Russia are in progress. In the same time, the OECD is strengthening its growing partnership with major emerging economies, including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa.