The Guyana government last week protested the lack of enforcement for CARICOM trade rules saying that the practice by some states was harming its domestic agricultural sector.
Trade Minister Clement Rohee said he has lodged a protest with the CARICOM Secretariat and is proposing that affected countries be compensated. The said if the practice was allowed to continue it would erode the working of the CSME and harm development in the sub-region.
Other six CARICOM members have agreed to complete all arrangements and join the CARICOM Single Market (CSM) by March 31, the CARICOM Secretariat announced last week.
The six nations –Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts & Nevis, Saint Lucia, and St Vincent & the Grenadines- advised of their readiness at the 20th meeting of the Council for Trade and Economic Development, held in Georgetown, Guyana on last week.
Uruguay Foreign Affairs minister Reynaldo Gargano vehemently denied Thursday that the Uruguayan government was advancing in a controversial free trade agreement with United States.
The issue which has become controversial both inside the Uruguayan ruling left wing coalition and in Mercosur blew alarms in Brazil and Argentina.
The European Central Bank left interest rates unchanged at 2.25 percent in its Thursday January 12 meeting. ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet said that on the basis of regular economic and monetary analyses, “we have decided to keep the key ECB interest rates unchanged following the increase of a quarter of a point on December 2005.”
Mr. Trichet added that according to information available, real GDP growth in the Euro zone did indeed improve in the second half of 2005, as expected. According to Eurostat´s first estimate, real GDP grew at a quarter-on-quarter rate of 0.6 percent in the third quarter of 2005, compared with 0.4 percent in the second quarter.
Jean-Cyril Spinetta, chief executive of Air France-KLM, has denied recent press speculation by saying that there are no talks underway with Alitalia concerning a merger of the two airlines.
Recently, Alitalia has shared that it has no plan to merge with French airline Air France in the near future, but cooperation between them will continue.
Microsoft Caribbean expects to make a big splash with its corporate clients across the region when the software maker launches the new range of enterprise scale software packages dubbed Microsoft Dynamics, to its corporate and government clients next week.
“This will not only be a launch of the latest version of our enterprise productivity software, but we will also unveil the innovative strategies we will be using to get the software into the hands of users,” says George Gobin, General Manager of Microsoft´s West Indies operations.