Finance & Economics | WPN World People News

Israel’s economy has strong fundamentals, but the country needs to address productivity, inequality and poverty if it wants to improve well-being and reduce socio-economic divides, according to the OECD’s latest Economic Survey of Israel.

The Board of Directors of the World Bank approved a US$200 million loan to the State of Bahia in Northeast Brazil to increase the effective use of the state’s road infrastructure as a way to stimulate economic growth and reduce poverty. The second phase of the Bahia Road Rehabilitation and Maintenance Project will directly benefit more than 250,000 people in remote state communities, as well as 60,000 daily users of the state’s road network.

MEPs urge EU member states to claw back EU funds lost through fraud or irregular spending, and the EU Commission to use its executive powers to help them to fight fraud and tax avoidance, in a resolution passed by the Budgetary Control Committee on Thursday. The resolution, on how EU funds were spent in 2014, also asks the Commission to assess member states’ corruption-fighting performance each year and to maintain its strict policy on suspending payments in the event of spending irregularities.

On January 27, 2016, the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) completed the third and last review of Morocco’s economic performance under a program supported by a two-year Precautionary and Liquidity Line (PLL) arrangement, and reaffirmed Morocco’s continued qualification to access PLL resources.

The heads of the OECD and UNHCR, at a joint high-level Conference on the integration of beneficiaries of international protection in Paris on January 28, have called on governments to scale up their efforts to help refugees integrate and contribute to the societies and economies of Europe.

On January 28 ( Thursday), The Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Latvia and the World Bank signed the Latvia Tax Policy and Equity Reimbursable Service Agreement (RAS) that aims to review the current tax system in Latvia through a lens of efficiency, competitiveness, revenue mobilization and equity.

End-of-Mission press releases include statements of IMF staff teams that convey preliminary findings after a visit to a country. The views expressed in this statement are those of the IMF staff and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF’s Executive Board.

Countries where agriculture is a major economic activity have greater room for improving key regulations that govern the agribusiness sector, a new World Bank report finds.

The European Commission presented Thursday a series of measures for a coordinated EU-wide response to corporate tax avoidance, notably through implementation of the global standards developed under the OECD/G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Project. The Commission proposal would align tax laws in all 28 EU countries, in order to fight aggressive tax practices by multinational enterprises. The package includes legally-binding measures to block the most common tax avoidance methods, a recommendation on preventing tax treaty abuse and the proposed sharing of tax-related information on multinationals operating in the EU.