Finance & Economics | WPN World People News

A worker prunes trees on a farm in South Africa.

The Government of Nepal and the World Bank on July 17,2020 signed a $450 million (around Rs. 54 billion) Financing Agreement that will help Nepal improve the efficiency and safety of transport infrastructure, improve efficiency of cross-border trade, and strengthen capacity for strategic road network management. This is the single largest value project that the Government of Nepal has signed with the World Bank.

Young entrepreneurs who want their work to have a positive impact on their communities, urgently need more help from governments if they’re to succeed and resist the COVID-19-fuelled economic downturn, UN economists said on Thursday.

Vendors in a bakery in Constantine, Algeria, during the COVID-19 crisis.

Kosovo has improved on many areas of cybersecurity capacity and has gained a comprehensive understanding of existing gaps and opportunities for capacity building in recent years, a new report assessing Kosovo’s cybersecurity says. The report uses the Cybersecurity Capacity Maturity Model for Nations (CMM) methodology, developed by the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre (GCSCC) of the University of Oxford. This is the second such assessment by GCSCC researchers in Kosovo and was conducted with support from the Ministry of Economy and Environment. The initial exercise was conducted in 2015, thus making Kosovo the first country worldwide to have piloted the CMM and then undergone the CMM update assessment.

The Government of India, Government of Tamil Nadu and the World Bank on June 29, 2020 signed an agreement to help low-income groups in the state of Tamil Nadu get access to affordable housing.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) is providing a €100 million global loan to Raiffeisenlandesbank Oberösterreich (RLB OÖ). “We want to use these funds to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) invest, focusing particularly on climate action and innovation projects and on sustainability. Despite the current COVID-19 situation, we must not lose sight of the future – sustainability is therefore playing an increasingly important role for us,” said Heinrich Schaller, CEO of RLB OÖ. A portion of the funds will also go towards promoting investments in companies with female leaders. The idea behind this comes from an EU pilot project in the banking sector that aims to enhance women’s participation in management.

In response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis, the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) decided to set up a new backstop facility, called the Eurosystem repo facility for central banks (EUREP), to provide precautionary euro repo lines to central banks outside the euro area. EUREP addresses possible euro liquidity needs in case of market dysfunction resulting from the COVID-19 shock that might adversely impact the smooth transmission of ECB monetary policy.

Hong Kong government published in the Gazette on June 19,2020 the Inland Revenue (Amendment) (Ship Leasing Tax Concessions) Ordinance 2020 to implement the 2019 Policy Address initiative of providing tax concessions to qualifying ship lessors and qualifying ship leasing managers. The Ordinance takes retrospective effect from April 1, 2020.

A staff team from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), led by Ms. Corinne Deléchat, conducted a virtual mission from June 2-12, 2020 and engaged in discussions as part of the first review of the IMF’s Policy Coordination Instrument (PCI) approved in January 2020.