Tax-free life may soon become history for people of Saudi Arabia, as the country's government approved introduction of value added tax, proposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), reports The Guardian. The 5% tax will be applied to certain products in accordance with agreement on cooperation of the six Gulf countries, which was reached in June 2016. Residents of the region have long...

PwC released its annual economic outlook for 2017, which indicates the main trends to be tracked in the global economy in the current year. Analysts of the agency believe that such forecasts are important for business planning and future investing. Globalization recedes According to PwC’s expectations, the world trade will be growing slower than world production for the third consecutive year....

France has had the second round of party primaries. Now, there are two candidates left out from seven - former Prime Minister Manuel Valls and former Minister of Education and Science Benoît Hamon, who won with a convincing advantage of preliminary 58.65% in his favor. 7,5 thousand polling stations had been opened since nine in the morning across France. From 1.9 million to 2.1 million people...

British Prime Minister Theresa May and US President Donald Trump are meeting in Washington this Friday, 27 January. There’s no surprise in the fact that Mrs. May is the first foreign leader to hold talks with the new master of the White House. Both countries have a long history of cooperation and traditionally occupy similar positions on global policy. For this reason, the US-British relations...

According to annual report of Demographia research company, housing in Hong Kong was the least affordable in the world in 2016. Average cost of real estate there was 18.1 times higher than average annual household income. In total, Demographia’s analysts have studied more than 400 cities in nine countries. Of them, New Zealand (5.9) and Australia (5.5) are noted as states with the most expensive...

Barack Obama was the 44th US president, and his 8-year presidential term ended on January 20. During these eight years, the country was faced with the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. As a result, the U.S. has changed its economy and political system. In addition, during all eight years the country has been at war with different groups and for different reasons. All changes,...

Over the past 40 years, oil and gas fields in the North Sea have been one of the major "cash cows" of the British Treasury. However, new calculations show that the situation can soon change dramatically. Decommissioning of old wells would require a total of about £ 24 billion of taxpayers' money, which is more than expected profit from extraction of remaining resources in the fields (and more...

It is just one day before inauguration of Donald Trump. The closer the day of his inauguration, the more scandals are emerging around the US president-elect: a lawsuit, a boycott by the congressmen, diplomatic complaints from Beijing and protests in Washington. According to American intelligence services, inauguration of the 45th US president will be visited up to 900 thousand people, which is...

The Australian Government has placed 9.3 billion Australian dollars ($ 7 billion) of bonds with maturity in December 2021. This issue of bonds is the largest in the country’s history. According to Bloomberg, demand among investors for Australian bonds was high, in spite of doubts about the country’s higher credit rating and the government's ability to cope with the budget deficit. Forecast of...