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Nairobi, Kenya — In a year of fast-paced reform, East African economies continue to improve their performance, finds a new report by IFC and the World Bank.

Spain's economy needs far-reaching and comprehensive reforms. The challenges are severe: a dysfunctional labor market, the deflating property bubble, a large fiscal deficit, heavy private sector and external indebtedness, anemic productivity growth, weak competitiveness, and a banking sector with pockets of weakness. Ambitious fiscal consolidation is underway, recently reinforced and front-loaded. This needs to be complemented with growth-enhancing structural reforms, building on the progress made on product markets and the housing sector, especially overhauling the labor market. A bold pension reform, along the lines proposed by the government, should be quickly adopted. Consolidation and reform of the banking system needs to be accelerated. Such a comprehensive strategy would be helped by broad political and social support, and time is of the essence.

New Delhi: The Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh boasted of the economic growth during a National Press Conference today in New Delhi on the occasion of completion of one year of UPA Government in its second term. However, he accepted 'the past couple of years' had been exceptionally difficult years for the Indian economy, that is what the opposition have been claiming right from the beginning of his rule.

New Delhi: The ITU World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC-10) opened today in Hyderabad with a call to meet the connectivity targets by 2015. This high-level global meeting will focus on development priorities in telecommunications and information and communication technologies (ICT) and agree on the programmes, projects and initiatives to implement them.

Like politics, governance is also an art of managing contradictions. Himachal Pradesh's Prem Kumar Dhumal-led BJP government has, however, failed to faultlessly practise the art for managing the contradictions between environmental protection objectives and needs of the state's economic development. Whatever and whenever efforts to manage these contradictions are made, they often get influenced by the ruling party's partisan interests and governance deficiencies.

The successive governments in India have been tinkering with the prices of petroleum products for the final consumers. The hike in the prices of petrol, diesel, kerosene and cooking gas from time to time has tended to be ad hoc, hesitant and half hearted. To put away for populist considerations doing something, which is unavoidable, is neither good economics nor good politics. The UPA government-I & II, headed by Mr. Manmohan Singh has been unable again in facing squarely tough issues in the case of the fixation of the prices of crude oil and petroleum products.

New York: Sixteen months after an Israeli military offensive inflicted widespread damage in the Gaza Strip, about three quarters of the damaged buildings and infrastructure have still not been repaired, a new United Nations report says.

New York: Despite repeated global commitments to protect the planet's species and habitats, the variety of life continues to decline at an unprecedented rate, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned, urging action to curb the root causes of biodiversity decline.

The liaison officers, well-dressed and glib talking, have been the face of the modern capitalism before the economic liberalization. They moved along Delhi's Bhawans and official bungalows chasing files and greasing palms on behalf of their industrial houses. They all kept an office in Delhi. Bureaucracy and political hangers-on loved them but the rest of India had derided them as a symbol of the much hated 'licence-permit-quota raj'. In 1992, finance minister of the Narasimha Rao government had thundered: No more do we need those file chasers and touts.

NEW DELHI: India and China will be competing for filling the slot of one new permanent membership that will be filled by the G-8 by 2011.The issue will figure at the coming meeting of the group of eight developed countries at Toronto on June 25 and 26, 2010. G-8 presently consists of United States, Japan, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Russia. European Union is also a member.G-8 has other five participating countries- India, China, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico.