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I have chosen this article because I think the situation it reports is a bit ironic. Russia's Foreign Ministry is criticizing the human rights situation in Europe without presenting any facts, while in the human development ranking; they occupy the 55th position in the world, behind every EU country except for Romania (56th) and Bulgaria (57th). The Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and income indices used to rank countries into four tiers of human development. I disagree with the opinion expressed by the article because since the establishment of UE there has been made a huge step towards the increase of equality in the member countries. For example, the highest scores in gender equality are achieved by European countries like Finland or Iceland.

This article represents the perfect example of how the balance accounts aren't equaling out! The article states that the the US debt has increased due to a decrease in exports. What this tells us is that the current account has decreased and therefore has further de-equalized the situation. Therefore as the article states the debt has grown by 0.4% to $38.8 billions dollars. Telling is us that the capital and current accounts arent balancing eachother

Sometimes, i think the taxes are too high for some state like New York and California. You have to pay 40% of your income tax, which is I think it too much. I understand why the government did that, but think about it, 40% is almost half of your income! May be I came from the country that equal just one state of America, but more people. So that's why I don't have to pay tax that much since the division is larger. According to what we've learned, I think the government should put high tax on the bad goods for every states instead of put 40% tax on people's income.

Benjamin Diokno of Malaya Business Insight believes that taxes on cigarettes, liquor, gambling, and oil should be taxed much more heavily. He believes they should account for one third of all taxes. Price elasticity is about 0.6 for cigarettes and about 0.23 for liquor. I do not agree with Benjamin on this one. Firstly, because I do not believe that drinking or smoking is a sin. Some people have lots of pain and trouble in this world and maybe drinking is the only way for them to experience peace. And what if someone has just come off drugs, so instead uses cigarettes instead of Cocaine. Would you still think its a sin to smoke cigarettes? These should be taxed just as equally as other products. Im interested on your views. Comment and let me know !

This article talks about the relationship between the success of a country at the olympics and its Human Development Index. The countries that had a higher HDI won more medals than countries with low Human Development Index. Nevertheless, Ethiopia hasn't followed the trend. With HDI equal to 0.33, Ethiopia came 29th in the end of the games. It is not surprising that there is a relationship between HDI and number of medals. In developing countries sports are often not as popular as in developed countries. In the US students are encouraged to develop both educational and extra-curricular skills. While on the other hand, in lots of developing countries education is the only aspect that values.

This article is about the drop in balance of payment deficit in Egypt in 2012. Balance of payment deficit is when the import of goods and services exceed the export of goods and services. A bank of the country says that such a situation has occurred because of the large number of Egyptian laborers working abroad, especially in countries in The Gulf. We know that in theory, the balance of payments should equal 0. Although balance of payment deficit dropping is a good thing, economists still say that this is still a pressure on the Egyptian government and they will have to strike a deal with the IMF.

China, the world's top wheat and rice consumer, will issue the same tariff import quotas for grains and cottons in the year 2014 as they did in 2013. The wheat import quotas are at 9.6 million tones, corn at 7.2 million tones, rice at 5.3 million tones, and cotton at 894,000 tones. The low tariff-rate is 1 percent while grains imported without the quota allocation would be charged a 65 percent import duty.The tariff import quotas is imposed in the hope to help chinese farmers and to also levy high import duties on agriculture products. However, due to its agreement with World Trade Organization, China is still obliged to allow imports with lower duties. This article clearly connects to the topic of protectionism. Here, the Chinese government hopes to help its domestic agriculture industry by limiting imports. This imposition of quotas will lower the imports which would increase the amount of local production, therefore increasing more revenue for the domestic producers. Here, we can also see the role of WTO arranging trade among countries. Here the obligations create equality between China market and its import countries.