POLITICAL ECONOMY

Amazon favoured big sellers on its India platform—and used them to maneuver around rules meant to protect the country's small retailers from getting crushed by e-commerce giants, internal documents show. It was early 2019, and senior Amazon.com Inc executive Jay Carney was preparing for an important meeting. The former press secretary to US President Barack Obama, Carney was scheduled to talk with India's ambassador to the United States in Washington, D.C. In Delhi, the Indian government had just announced foreign direct investment regulations that threatened to disrupt Amazon's business in...

By Olga Aristeidou The President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Odile Renaud-Basso, is visiting Greece on 18 and 19 February in an entirely virtual format over a two-day programme. As travelling and physical meetings continue to be disrupted by the pandemic, the EBRD President will leverage digital platforms, which have profoundly reshaped our ways of working and international relations over the past year. Ms Renaud-Basso said: “I am delighted to meet the government and our clients for the first time in my new post. I am...

By Josephine Akaerr, Special Correspondent Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, has inaugurated the Bure Integrated Agro-Industrial Park (IAIP) in Amhara State. In his remarks, Abiy stated that his government regards the integrated agro-industrial parks as a priority. Referring to the Christian Bible and the first public miracle of Jesus when he turned water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana, the Prime Minister called the Bure IAIP the “Cana of Ethiopia”, which, he said, is expected to lead the country to prosperity by exporting agricultural products to the...

By re-injecting gas revenues into the economy and facilitating infrastructural development nation-wide, Mozambique can realize its goal of becoming a regional tourism leader, says CHARNE HUNDERMARK. The African continent is renowned for its rich diversity of cultures, languages, wildlife and landscapes, in which Mozambique enjoys the privilege of encapsulating these elements in one country. The southeastern nation is both a coastal paradise – with 2,500 km of white-sand beaches and an extensive coastline – and a wildlife utopia, with conservation projects covering approximately 15 per cent of the country’s surface...

By James Blackman The French government has announced funding for new national industrial 5G projects, as parts of its France Relance (France Relaunch) package. It has also raised alarm bells that the country is falling behind rival economies, notably Germany, on the rollout of 5G to stimulate its digital change in its industrial sector. Financial newspaper Los Echos put the funding at €27 million(US$32.51million) for four industrial 5G projects, equivalent to about a third of their total forecasted costs, it said. The government said funding was being directed at key...