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A high-level panel set up by the government to overhaul the foreign investment regime in the country is set to recommend that any investment above 10% in a company's equity be classified as foreign direct investment (FDI) and below that as portfolio investment. This article conveys a change in the perspective of FDI. The committee has significantly scaled down its ambitions from reported draft proposals that had gone to the extent of suggesting significant reforms in the overseas investment regime. The committee is now likely to stick to the task assigned and only make recommendations regarding the distinction between foreign direct investment and foreign portfolio investment (FPI).The panel has refrained from suggesting any change in the limit on overseas investment, the official said. The default cap for foreign portfolio investment will continue to be 24%.

Hong Kong government has decided to impose 15% excise tax on property in Hong Kong that is bought by foreigners. This is a difficult measure for many foreigners wishing to purchase houses in Hong Kong. Some foreigners that has been around for several years are also not feeling as happy as before. Some clients are also thinking about leaving. The government primary reason is to protect its economy from inflating property resulting from foreign investments, low interest rates, and limited supply of housing in the market. Clearly, this situation is related to the topic of excise tax, or specifically, ad valorem tax- fixed percentage is charged on a particular good. This has led to an increase in price, which leads to a fall in demand from foreign investors that wish to invest in Hong Kong properties. This shows that properties are in fact elastic products, but government is able to impose tax since it does not affect the producers dramatically and it does not affect the majority of the consumers. Only foreign investors are affected. Realtor can still generate sales from local investors.

This is a great article primarily because of its recent nature. As can be seen from the date (it was published today, february 14th) this article serves as a great example of the impact that foreign direct investment can have on a nation. This particular article outlines the consequences of a decrease in FDI for Ukraine.

Foreign direct investment in Mexico has increased 178 percent in 2013 from the the $12.7 billion seen in 2012. The increase in foreign direct investment was stimulated through economic reforms in industries ranging from telecoms to energy, which was pushed through Congress by President Enrique Pena Niet. The economic reforms has lured in many investors. Increase in foreign direct investment can help stimulate aggregate demand in Mexico, since there are an increase in capital inflows into Mexico. With an increase in aggregate demand, the country GDP can increase, and therefore contribute to economic development. The article also states that the investment was largely made into manufacturing sector. This could help contribute to research and development for machines or technology.

It is an article about the Nigerian government that has banned the importation of foreign currency in order to protect the Nigerian currency. It is worth to point out that there were indications that the latest move was sequel to the bank's withdrawal of the operating licenses of 20 Bureaux de Change found to have purchased and sold huge sums of dollars with no documentation to show details of the transactions. The low value of the Nigerian currency has affecting negatively the society because more domestic producers are only accepting the dollar as a means of payment. The government reports that the continued import of dollars would have a devastated effect on the Nigerian economy because it would gradually become dorallized.

This article is an interesting one because it focuses on the political side of currency manipulation. It delves into how currency purchases can be used to put political pressure on a nation and to increase one's clout in the world as an economy to be reckoned with. The specific focus of this article is how china is using currency purchasing in order to have a political effect.  

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.

Brazil's central bank announced a $60 billion program on Thursday aimed at halting the slide of the Brazilian real, making Brazil the latest emerging economy to seek to prop up its sagging currency. Similar moves have been made by central banks in Indonesia and Turkey. I chose this article because it covers one of the most important aspects of foreign currency, which is the depreciation of it. The consequences of having a weak currency could be severe, as the value decreases in comparison with other currencies, for example Euros, therefore it will take more Brazilian Reals to buy Euros (1 Euro= 2.98804259 Brazilian Reals). In this case this depreciation of the currency has led to some action from the Central Bank in order to boost up the value of the currency. This does not only affect Brazil, it also happens to other emergent economies such as India.

Thai Baht has depreciated 0.6 percent to 31.305 per dollar in the previous weeks. This was the baht's weakest week in a month. This has been due to the recent political protests against the amnesty bill. Foreigners have been cutting holdings of the nation's assets in fear of instability. This shows how a demand for a currency can decrease due several factors, including political unrests. As foreigners fear that the nation future in terms of its economic performance is not stable, the demand for Thai baht decreased. People are more reluctant to invest as they fear the political unrests could lead to a fall in value for the assets.

PARIS - President François Hollande of France has begun a major charm offensive to convince the world that France is open for business in a bid to lure back investments, which have slumped since he took office. In this article author talks about the measures taken by the president of France François Hollande. Recently he has gathered chiefs of the largest multinational companies and investment funds to speak about the needs of France in the investments. He has admitted that France may appear as a country with some complexity in the process of investment, however, France is ready to open itself up. Article also talks about some other aspects one of them is the measures taken by the government related to government spending and taxation.

This article disclose a description of the situation about education in Asia. There are a lot of kids who want to get an English-language education in countries like USA or UK, but they would like to stay closer to their families, because not everybody can easily leave home and go to foreign country alone. Because of the high demand for schools that give international-level-education in English, there are more and more schools like that. But still I think supply of that type of education and schools is miserable, and that might be one of the reasons why the prices are so high. For example, in Kazakhstan we have a British school - Haileybury. It has an IB program as well as Riverstone International School does, the one that I go to. But! Riverstone is situated in Idaho, USA, and charges about $15,000 for one year of High School. Haileybury - aroung $32,000. The reason why I mentioned the location of Riverstone is because of the huge difference between being in US and Kazakhstan. Staying here in America helps to study English and understand cultural difference, being back in Kazakhstan, helps to stick to your family, but one will never fully undestand that international tone and go beyond certain level of English. Plus the prices are very different even if we would add tickets, insurance, etc, to go to America is even cheaper and has more benefits and positive sides. So in the conclusion, I just want to say that these type of schools is demanded by a lot of Asian (and not only Asian) students, but can be afforded only by affluent middle classes. Thus I hope there would be more supply of that type of schools, which led to competition between schools and cheaper prices (or our education system will change and we will have one standard system everywhere).

It is an article about the recession and unemployment in Spain. The unemployment is a very serious problem in Spain because the rate of unemployment is about 25% or more so is a lot. This article report that the Spanish situation is stabilizing but we can´t assume that is the end of the recession and the start of the new business cycle. The business cycle is the periodic fluctuations in economic activity measured by changes in real GDP. Output cannot continue to fall for ever as there will always be some people with jobs to maintain a given level of consumption, foreigners will demand exports, governments will continue to spend by running budget deficits, and people will be able to use savings to finance their consumption. Additionally, the low demand for money for investment will result in lower interest rates. Thus, aggregate demand will pick up, the economy will enter the recovery phase, and the cycle will repeat itself. So after the recession the national economy of Spain will suffer an economic growth, the amount of the goods and services produced by an economy over time will increase.

This article talks about how the recovery in the economic growth in India has weakened after three months of straight-increase, however the economic growth of India remains positive. This situation has been manly caused by the fact that there has been a slowdown in consumer sectors and investor demand and mantaining the confidence for these two would be essential to ensure a sustained economic growth. The BluFin Business Cycle Indicator (BCI), aims to meet everthing of the business cycle, and took into account five areas -- capital markets, foreign trade, policy, real economy and survey to determine and measure this situation

Danish government aims to reduce corporate tax to 22% by 2016. It also aims to increase international competitiveness by offering tax credits, reducing energy tax and public investments. This amendments is implemented in the hope of stimulating growth and make it more attractive for foreigners to run a business in Denmark. Reducing corporate taxes allow companies to have more capital for investments. This could potentially increase factors of production. This wil give corporate incentives to produce more efficiently. In all, this policy can produce a shift in the supply curve to the right, giving positive supply-side benefits.

It is a nice article about the central bank in my country Poland. The central bank in poland uses changes in interest rates to keep the inflation rate within the targeted range of 2.5% plus or minus 1%. This week the central bank has reduced the key rate by 25 basis points to 3 percent. As we know, a decrease in inflation will lead to the increase in consumption and investment. The consumption is the total spending of consumers in domestic products. With lower interest rates, consumers will borrow more money from the bank and they will spend more, so the AD curve will shift to the right. Investment is defined as the addition of capital stock to the economy. Lower interest rates will encourage the producers to spend more on investment. Another thing to take into consideration is that the decrease in inflation will make the exports from Poland more competitive in foreign countries where the inflation rate is much higher. Targeting inflation, whether explicitly or implicitly, is said to be beneficial as it results in a reduction in inflationary expectations. If the workers do not expect higher inflation then they will not make demands for increases in wages any higher than the expected rate of inflation and this will keep the costs of labour from rising excessively. Poland has enjoyed uninterrupted annual growth for the past two decades, and for a while after the financial crisis of 2008/9 the economy continued to defy the global downturn. However last year gross domestic product growth slowed to about two percent, less than half the pace in 2011, as infrastructure spending tailed off and the gloom from the euro zone started to filter through to previously bullish Polish consumers.

Canada's economy seems to have taken a hit as housing, jobs and exports fell. First there was a 21,900 jobs loss in January plus a 58,000 decrease in Canadians looking for work. In addition, exports fell 2.1%, exports to the US alone dropped, 4 points and imports fell as well. Furthermore a 19% reduction in the housing industry topped Canada's misfortune these past 2 months. Many Canadians are questioning the actions of the conservative government as economic growth is slowing to a crawl.

I think that you have chosen a very nice and interesting article because it's related to our actual topics. Is a good example about the importance of the exchange rates in the exports. If a country's exchange rate becomes stronger, then this makes the country's exports relatively more expensive to foreigners. According to the law of demand, this will cause the quantity of exports to fall. Another think to highlight is the increase of the unemployment rate, this will probably decrease the consumption because However, if people expect economic conditions to worsen then they are likely to reduce their consumption today in order to save for the future. In brief i think that it's a great article to talk about the aggregated demand, macroeconomic and the monetary policies.

I find this article particularly interesting because i never knew that Canada was suffering so much from the recession. Since it states in the article that 21,900 jobs were lost means that the household cinsumption must be very low a resulting in a low agregate demand, and since the agregate demand is low firms gain less proffit and therefore have to cut costs which in this case would be workers.

This article talks about how other countries, but in this case Spain, are sufferig from a very profound economic crises where its unemployment rate is 24.3%. It explains that with this rate of unemployment no foreign countryis going to invest in the country and that most young spaniards are going to travel abroad, further worsening the spanish situation, stating that its partly due to bad macroeconomic managemeent. It states that Spain should learn from Argentina, a country very similar from an economic point of view. It advises that Spain should leave the Euro zone because its constructed around a German macroeconomic policy that doesnt work for some countries, in this case Spain. So what is it says is that spain has a better chance of going by its own macroeconomic rules than piggybacking on Germanies

Recently the European Union has imposed a tariff on U.S. ethanol on the account of dumping. Dumping in international markets occurs when a country exports a good or service at a price that is lower in the foreign market than the domestic market. With a duty of $83.20 per metric ton, this tariff will cost exports more than $930 million per year. Tension has been building as there is a strain in transatlantic trade due to this implementation of a protectionism technique.

This article talks about how the government is trying to Real GDP of the country by lowering the taxes on exporting oil prices. By doing this the governmnet has enevitably increased the Real GDP because siince the oil firms FOP cost less they can now supply more oil, also the price will rise from 42$ per barrel to 70$ per barrel meaning that the oil firms will even make more of a profit. Again since the taxes have decreased it will cause foreign investments in the oil industry of Argentina since they just discovered that Argentina is setting on one of the biggest oil deposits. so overall, the long term aggregate will shift to the right, an increase in the real GDp

Argentina has devised a new system of export taxes on oil shipments that will cut taxes, as the government seeks to encourage investments to revive production. The change means energy companies will receive $70 per barrel of exported oil, up from $42 previously. Argentina controls the price of oil exports in order to guarantee domestic supply. The reform means that the state will only retain the difference between the market prices, meaning increased revenue for oil companies that export crude. The long run aggregate supply is expected to shift the right, an increase in the real GDP.

I have chosen this article because it is related with our current topic FDI and because I think that Turkey is one of the developing countries that are making a very good use of it. The article reports the distribution of the FDI in the economy and the changes in FDI from last year. According to the article: "Turkey received foreign direct investment (FDI) of $12.6 billion in 2013, a drop of 4.1 percent compared to 2012". I think that nowadays one of the biggest advantages of Turkey is the closeness to the EU market. This advantage and the good infrastructural base grant Turkey a great potential.