Posts filed under 'Non-governmental Organizations'
April 23rd, 2008 at 07:11pm
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) held its largest meeting ever during 8-11th April. Attended by member states and 2 new participants, China and Spain, the focus of the meeting was research and development needs in safeguards and verification. 41 delegates discussed the future agenda of the Member State Support Programme (MSSP), specifically addressing areas of research, technology transfer and operational support for verification activities. Given the IAEA’s own limitations in finance and implementation, the IAEA relies on its member states in order to meet its safeguards. The organization also released its publication, “Research and Development Programme for Nuclear Verification, 2008-2009,” a document released biennially detailing the IAEA’s activities in research, development and implementation activities. For further details, please click here.
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April 15th, 2008 at 06:53am
The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) responded to the controversy surrounding investments by government-owned Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) by releasing a report stating its commitment to remain open to such investments as long as they are commercially rather than politically motivated. The report responds to concerns among OECD member countries that such funds will be used for political purposes. It also sought to deal with fears among the oil-producing and export-focused Asian nations that operate SWFs that recipient nations will use political concerns as a means to impede legitimate SWF commercial activities. For more information, please click here.
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March 21st, 2008 at 02:40pm
A new OECD study investigated the interaction between income, inflation and tax obligations in OECD countries. Notably, workers in several countries saw their nominal tax burden rise in response to high earnings growth. This phenomenon, known as fiscal drag, occurs in countries where tax rates increase as nominal taxable income rises. Workers are thus forced to pay higher taxes due to inflation or, ironically, after experiencing increases in real income. The latter scenario played out in several upper-middle income OECD countries that experienced high growth rates in full-time earnings, such as Greece, Hungary, South Korea, Portugal and Turkey. Despite concerted legislative efforts to ease tax burdens, such high growth in earnings – in many cases more than 40% – pushed enough workers into a higher income bracket to create fiscal drag.
For the full story, please click here.
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March 6th, 2008 at 04:25am
The OECD report, “Going for Growth 2008″, is an annual study that measures the extent to which the world’s developed countries follow the OECD’s recommended strategies for promoting growth. The study confirms the generally held notion that Americans work longer hours than Europeans. This disparity, however, is almost entirely attributable to differences in women’s habits, with men tending to work similar hours on both sides of the Atlantic but European women working fewer hours than their American counterparts. In attempting to explain this finding, the report points to differences in the regulatory environment, specifically emphasizing the role of Europe’s higher marginal tax rates.
For the whole story, click here.
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March 2nd, 2008 at 01:01pm
On March 2, 2007, the International Atomic Energy Agency (“IAEA”) provided a report about Iran’s nuclear safeguards to its Board of Governors, its 35-member policymaking arm. The report, which details Iranian nuclear developments that have occurred since November 15, 2007, is entitled: Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and Relevant Provisions of Security Council Resolutions 1737 (2006) and 1747 (2007) in the Islamic Republic of Iran. While the Board will discuss its contents during a meeting in Vienna on Monday, March 3, 2007, the report’s circulation is circumscribed, to be read and discussed only within the Agency unless the Board itself decides otherwise.
Dr. El Baradei, the Agency’s General Director and a 2005 Noble Peace Prize Winner (along with the IAEA) defines the task in Iran as “[making] sure that the Iranian nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes,” and says that “in the last four months, in particular, we have made quite good progress in clarifying the outstanding issues that had to do with Iran´s past nuclear activities, with the exception of one issue, and that is the alleged weaponization studies that supposedly Iran has conducted in the past.” A transcript of an interview with Dr. El Baradei in regards to this latest report is readily available.
For the full story, please click here.
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February 24th, 2008 at 02:01am
The OECD, a Paris-based organization that aims to facilitate economic cooperation among 30 leading industrialized nations, recently released a report elucidating general trends in immigration in OECD countries. The report found that immigrants in OECD countries are generally better educated than locally-born populations. Roughly one in four immigrants have earned a university education, compared to the roughly one in five native-born residents who have done so. This is almost universally accompanied, however, by what OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría called the “problem of overqualification”, whereby immigrants find it difficult to find jobs that match their abilities. Gurría urged OECD countries to put into place policies to alleviate issues underlying the problem, which include language barriers and difficulties in evaluating foreign institutions of higher education. The report also notes the magnitude of the “brain drain”, a term used to denote the massive migration of skilled workers away from poor, undeveloped countries. The impact is especially stark amongst small African and Caribbean countries, with many having 40% of their skilled workers and 50% of their health professionals living abroad.
For the full story, click here.
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November 13th, 2007 at 08:20pm
The African Union continues to take cognizance of the “Arche de Zoe” affair two weeks after condemning it as unjustifiable, scandalous, and an abuse of humanitarian interference. The incident refers to a case in which sixteen Europeans (including nine French citizens) who claimed to be on a mission to save war orphans from Darfur could be facing stiff sentences and hard labor after attempting to airlift 103 children out of Chad. Members of the group, which is linked to a French charity called l’Arche de Zoé (Zoe’s Ark), are charged in Chad with extortion and child abduction. Amid evidence that the 103 children in question were not necessarily sick, orphaned, or even from Darfur, the failed mercy mission has grown into a diplomatic scandal that could jeopardize international plans to deploy peacekeepers in the borderlands of the troubled Sudanese region.
The full text of the press release is available here.
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