The World Bank had deployed a team to Uganda after the law was enacted in May and determined that additional measures were necessary to ensure projects align with the bank’s environmental and social standards.

“No new public financing to Uganda will be presented to our Board of Executive Directors until the efficacy of the additional measures has been tested,” the World Bank Group said in a statement on Tuesday.

Continue reading HERE

Source: https://apnews.com/article/uganda-world-bank-lgbtq-rights-funding-halted-d672264895775d44aee1bb63e7f072d0

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IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva and World Bank President David Malpass said the war was driving commodity prices higher, which risked further fueling inflation, and disruptions in financial markets would continue to worsen should the conflict persist. Sanctions imposed by the United States, Europe and other allies would also have a significant economic impact.

The leaders said they were deeply shocked and saddened by the war, but did not explicitly mention Russia, which is a shareholder in both institutions. Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 and its armed forces are bombarding Ukrainian urban areas. read more
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-isolation-intensifies-ukraine-fighting-rages-2022-03-01/

“People are being killed, injured, and forced to flee, and massive damage is caused to the country’s physical infrastructure,” Georgieva and Malpass said in a joint statement. “We stand with the Ukrainian people through these horrifying developments. The war is also creating significant spillovers to other countries.”

The IMF and the World Bank were urgently increasing financing and policy support for Ukraine, and had been in daily contact with the authorities on crisis measures, they said.

The IMF board could consider Ukraine’s request for emergency financing through the Rapid Financing Instrument as early as next week, they said. An additional $2.2 billion was available before the end of June under its stand-by arrangement.

The World Bank is also preparing a $3 billion package of support in the coming months, they said. That funding would start with a fast-disbursing budget injection of at least $350 million that the bank’s board will consider this week, followed by $200 million for health and education programs.

Reuters first reported the $350 million loan earlier on Tuesday. read more
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/exclusive-world-bank-pushes-350-mln-ukraine-loan-approval-within-days-sources-2022-03-01/

The two institutions said they were also assessing the economic and financial impact of the war and refugees on other countries in the region and the world. They said they stood ready to provide enhanced policy, technical, and financial support to Ukraine’s neighbors as needed. More than 660,000 people have fled Ukraine to countries such as Poland, Romania and Hungary since the invasion began, the U.N. refugee agency said.

“Coordinated international action will be crucial to mitigate risks and navigate the treacherous period ahead,” the institutions said.

Reporting by Andrea Shalal and David Lawder; Editing by Grant McCool

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/world-bank-imf-racing-get-aid-ukraine-coming-weeks-months-2022-03-01/

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Citing a “30-year race to the bottom” in which countries have slashed corporate tax rates in an effort to attract multinational businesses, Yellen said the Biden administration would work with other advanced economies in the Group of 20 to set a minimum.

“Competitiveness is about more than how U.S.-headquartered companies fare against other companies in global merger and acquisition bids,” Yellen said in a virtual speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “It is about making sure that governments have stable tax systems that raise sufficient revenue to invest in essential public goods.”

The speech was Yellen’s highest-profile so far on international affairs and came just as the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund began in a virtual format.

“It is important to work with other countries to end the pressures of tax competition and corporate tax base erosion,” Yellen said.

President Joe Biden has proposed hiking the U.S. corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%, partially undoing the Trump administration’s cut from 35% in its 2017 tax legislation. Biden also wants to set a minimum U.S. tax on overseas corporate income and to make it harder for companies to shift earnings offshore. The increase would help pay for the White House’s ambitious $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal.

Yellen’s remarks essentially serve as an endorsement of negotiations that have been underway at the 37-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for roughly two years, said Alan Auerbach, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley.

Biden’s U.S. corporate tax proposal includes an increase to the U.S. minimum tax that was included in Trump’s tax law, from 10.5% to 21%. One focus of the OECD talks is whether other countries will adopt similar minimums. Biden’s corporate tax measure would also penalize other countries without a minimum corporate tax by more heavily taxing their subsidiaries in the U.S.

Auerbach said that the OECD has helped foster other agreements around issues such as bank secrecy.

“There is precedent for this sort of thing,” Auerbach said. “But this would be a big deal because it would get countries to coordinate their tax systems in ways they haven’t before.”

Also on Monday, Biden said he is “not at all” concerned that a higher corporate tax rate would cause some U.S. companies to relocate overseas, though Yellen’s proposed global minimum corporate tax is intended to prevent that from happening.

“There’s no evidence to that … that’s bizarre,” Biden said in response to a question from reporters.

According to the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning think tank, the Trump administration’s corporate tax reduction lowered the U.S. rate from the highest among the OECD countries to the 13th highest. Many analysts have argued, however, that few large U.S. multinationals paid the full tax.

“We have 51 or 52 corporations from the Fortune 500 who haven’t paid a single penny a day for three years?” Biden said. “Come on.”

Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Penn., said that Yellen’s proposal was unlikely to make much progress overseas. He also said Republicans should reverse any corporate tax hike if they regain a congressional majority in upcoming elections.

“Spoiler alert: This effort will likely fail and even if there is some sort of agreement, it will be non-binding because it is not a treaty,” Toomey said.

Yellen, meanwhile, downplayed the potential for the Biden administration’s domestic agenda, which also includes a $1.9 trillion COVID relief package approved last month, to spur higher inflation. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, among others, has raised such concerns since the relief bill passed.

“I strongly doubt that it’s going to cause inflationary pressures,” Yellen said, referring to the administration’s infrastructure proposal. “The problem for a very long time has been inflation that’s too low, not inflation that’s too high.”

Yellen also said the United States will step up its efforts at home and overseas to fight climate change, “after sitting on the sidelines for four years.”

Treasury will work to “promote the flow of capital toward climate-aligned investments and away from carbon-intensive investments,” Yellen said. That approach has raised the ire of GOP members of Congress, who say it threatens the ability of the U.S. oil and gas industry to access needed lending.

Yellen also noted that many developing nations are lagging in vaccinating their populations, and have also experienced harsh economic consequences from the pandemic. As many as 150 million people worldwide will fall into extreme poverty this year, Yellen said.

“The result will likely be a deeper and longer-lasting crisis, with mounting problems of indebtedness, more entrenched poverty, and growing inequality,” Yellen said.

The Biden administration supports the creation of $650 billion in new lending capacity at the IMF to address such issues, she said. Many Republicans in Congress oppose the new allotment, arguing that much of the funding would flow to relatively better-off developing countries, such as China.

Yellen acknowledged that the additional credit would be distributed to each IMF member, but argued that “significant resources will go to the poorest countries most in need.” Nations can also donate some of their funds to the hardest-hit countries, which she expects many will do, she added.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/janet-yellen-minimum-global-corporate-income-tax-0a839a4705566a8b9f8bd5411bfe62d5

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The letter was sent to the Spring 2021 virtual meeting (April 5-11) between the globalist World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and delivered through Peter Cardinal Turkson, Prefect of the Holy See’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

In the letter, the Pope says the Covid-19 pandemic forced the world to “confront a series of grave and interrelated socio-economic, ecological, and political crises.” Francis brought up one of his favorite topics, climate change, claiming, “We are, in fact, in debt to nature itself, as well as the people and countries affected by human-induced ecological degradation and biodiversity loss.”

Francis’s language sounds similar to that of the globalist founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Klaus Schwab, who designed the anti-Catholic “Great Reset,” a plan heavily dependent on a “green financial agenda.” Francis has sent addresses to WEF already four times during his eight years as pope and has permitted a Vatican roundtable at WEF’s annual Swiss conference site, Davos.

Pope Francis also refers to the secular fraternity outlined in his recent encyclical Fratelli Tutti, and calls for “a justly financed vaccine solidarity,” which, according to him, is necessary to fulfill “the law of love and the health of all.”

“Here,” he continues, “I reiterate my call to government leaders, businesses and international organizations to work together in providing vaccines for all, especially for the most vulnerable and needy.”

Pope Francis recently called for a “new world order” and, according to the letter, this world order should be globalist, as he says, “There remains an urgent need for a global plan that can create new or regenerate existing institutions, particularly those of global governance, and help to build a new network of international relations for advancing the integral human development of all peoples.”

Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church are not mentioned at all in the letter, while God is mentioned only once—in the letter’s last line.

Source: https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/pope-francis-calls-for-global-governance-and-vaccines-for-all/

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In the order, Mr. Biden called for an expansion of the decades-old U.S. refugee program, which was gutted by former President Trump, who frequently portrayed refugees as economic and security risks. After former President Obama set a 110,000-person ceiling before leaving office, Mr. Trump slashed it every fiscal year, allocating a historically low 15,000 spots in 2020.

During a speech at the State Department earlier Thursday, Mr. Biden said the objective is to set a 125,000-person cap for fiscal year 2022, which starts in October. Mr. Biden also said he directed the State Department to consult with Congress “about making a down payment on that commitment as soon as possible,” hinting that he may move to raise the 15,000 cap for the current fiscal year.

“It’s going to take time to rebuild what has been so badly damaged, but that’s precisely what we’re going to do,” Mr. Biden said during his remarks, noting that refugee resettlement has historically enjoyed bipartisan support.

Last week, the United Nations refugee agency reported that countries around the globe received fewer than 23,000 refugees in 2020, the lowest number in nearly two decades, in part due to travel restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic. The agency said that out of the more than 20 million refugees it is assisting in different countries, 1.44 million are in urgent need of resettlement.

The U.S. admitted less than 12,000 refugees in fiscal year 2020 and received nearly 1,000 between October and December, according to the latest State Department data.

The modern U.S. refugee program, established in 1980, is designed to offer protection to people abroad who have faced persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group, like the LGBT community.

An Eritrean refugee woman is registered during a distribution of items organized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees at Mai Aini Refugee camp, in Ethiopia, on January 30, 2021. EDUARDO SOTERAS/GETTY IMAGES

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PARIS (AP) — Economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic has set back decades of progress against the most severe forms of malnutrition and is likely to kill 168,000 children before any global recovery takes hold, according to a study released Monday by 30 international organizations.

The study from the Standing Together for Nutrition Consortium draws on economic and nutrition data gathered this year as well as targeted phone surveys. Saskia Osendarp, who led the research, estimates an additional 11.9 million children — most in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa — will suffer from stunting and wasting, the most severe forms of malnutrition.

Women who are pregnant now “will deliver children who are already malnourished at birth, and these children are disadvantaged from the very start,” said Osendarp, executive director of the Micronutrient Forum. “An entire generation is at stake.”

The fight against malnutrition had been an unheralded global success until the coronavirus pandemic struck.

“It may seem like it’s a problem that is always with us but the numbers were going down prior to COVID,” said Lawrence Haddad, executive director of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. “Ten years of progress eliminated in 9 to 10 months.”

Before the pandemic, the number of stunted children declined globally each year, from 199.5 million in 2000 to 144 million in 2019. The number of children suffering from wasting stood at 54 million in 2010 and had dropped to 47 million last year. It’s expected to rise again to 2010 levels, according to the study.

The research was released at the start of a year-long effort to raise money against malnutrition. Around $3 billion was announced, though some of that includes prior commitments. Pakistan, which has some of the world’s most widespread malnutrition, pledged to spend $2.2 billion by 2025.

The consortium includes the World Bank, World Food Program, UNICEF, and USAID as well as private health foundations and universities. UNICEF pledged to spend $700 million on nutrition programs annually over the next five years, $224 million more than it has spent over the past five years.

Haddad said the next step is holding governments accountable for their promises, especially those whose citizens suffer the most from malnutrition.

“A lot of hunger is about governance,” he said. He added that the pandemic makes the benefits of nutrition clear because malnutrition leaves the body vulnerable to all kinds of disease, including coronavirus. “Nutrition is everyone’s best bet until the vaccine arrives.”

___

Follow AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

Source: https://apnews.com/article/pandemics-africa-nutrition-coronavirus-pandemic-0e2a17d63163d8558d203b2824a844fe

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View of damages in a supermarket in Valencia, Carabobo State, on May 5, 2017, the day after anti-government protesters looted stores, set fire to cars and clashed with police, leaving at least five people injured and one dead. Ronaldo Schemidt | AFP | Getty Images

Wasted oil riches

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The US wants its fiat dollar system to prevail for as long as possible. It has every interest in preventing a “rush out of dollars towards gold”, as happened in the 1970s. Since then, bankers have been trying to exercise control over the precious metal’s price. This war on gold has been ongoing for almost 100 years but gained traction in the 1960s with the forming of the London Gold Pool – whose members included the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland.

During meetings of central bank chiefs at the Bank for International Settlements in 1961, the eight participating countries agreed to make available a gold pool worth US$270 million. This was focused on preventing the gold price from rising above US$35 per troy ounce, as set during Bretton Woods, by selling official gold holdings from the central banks’ gold vaults.

However, in March 1968, the pool was disbanded because France would no longer cooperate. This signaled the start of a 13-year “bull market” and sent gold to more than US$800 per troy ounce in 1980.

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Central American refugees ride a cargo truck in Mexico. Photographer: Alejandro Cegarra/Bloomberg

Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are, by all accounts, countries ravaged by gang violence, drug trafficking and extreme poverty. It’s these elements that have driven wave after wave of illegal immigration to the U.S., drawing the ire of President Donald Trump.

And yet the bond market views the nations — especially the first two — as stable, almost safe, investments. In some cases, they can borrow at similar rates to regional powerhouses Brazil and Mexico.

It’s an odd thing, almost improbable sounding. And it reveals a surprising truth about these countries: They all have rock-solid fiscal accounts.

How’s that possible in such destitute places? Because it turns out, they earmark precious little money to basic social programs. Not only does this save them cash, allowing them to hold down their budget deficits, but it has the effect of encouraging the poor — those who would benefit the most from greater outlays for healthcare or housing — to emigrate.

This, in turn, has an added advantage for these nations: The migrants send growing quantities of dollars to their families back home, generating a steady flow of hard currency that is a central pillar of their economies. (For some perspective, their value is roughly 30 times greater than the aid money that a frustrated Trump pulled from the countries this week.)

When all of these elements are stitched together and viewed holistically, it can appear as if the economic model these governments have adopted is one based on exporting people. That might be an over-simplification — and it may not be the governments’ intent — but it is the net effect of the policy mix, according to longtime observers of the region.

“Migration is part of the model,” said Seynabou Sakho, the World Bank’s director for Central America. “A country may not have a big deficit, but at the same time, the needs of its people aren’t being met.”

Officials in the finance ministries and presidential offices of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Sakho’s colleagues at the World Bank run what they call social-protection studies. They try to measure how much support governments provide for the poor and the vulnerable, and they break their work down into several key indicators: poverty reduction, access to government assistance and the impact of that assistance. The three Central American nations, known collectively as the Northern Triangle, rank toward the bottom in each of those categories.

The World Bank also tracks social spending on a per-capita basis. In El Salvador, the number came to $562. It was even lower in Honduras, $278, and Guatemala, $258. That’s a fraction of the $2,193 spent in Costa Rica or the $2,269 in Brazil. The World Bank hasn’t updated that data set since 2012, but analysts say there have been few signs of improvement in recent years. Patronage and corruption, they say, is compounding the shortfall, siphoning off funds earmarked for the poor. Transparency International ranks the three nations in the bottom half of its Corruption Perceptions Index, with Guatemala in the lowest quartile.

Lucrecia Mack said she was astonished by how rampant graft was when she took the top job at Guatemala’s Health Ministry in 2016. It’s “everywhere,” she said. Documents are falsified, signatures are forged, invoices are made up. She remembers one scheme where officials bought new tires for ambulances, re-sold them to pocket the cash and left the old ones on the vehicles.

“The little money that the Health Ministry has winds up in the wrong hands,” said Mack, the daughter of a renowned human rights activist who was slain in 1990.

According to her calculations, Guatemala only spends about one-fifth of what it should annually on health care. “The budget has always been extremely tight.” As a result, she said, the ministry only has enough public clinics and hospitals to attend to about 6.5 million people. That was the population in 1975. It’s more than doubled since.

Poor infrastructure, like lack of running water and proper sewage in many places, exacerbates the effects of the funding shortfall. Maternal mortality rates, for example, are highest in the rural communities where there are the fewest highways, Mack said. She reeled off a litany of other health problems plaguing the nation: pneumonia, diarrhea, diabetes, cirrhosis, infant mortality, chronic malnutrition.

Mack lasted just 13 months in her post. When the president, Jimmy Morales, expelled a UN-backed body that had begun looking into his government as part of an investigation into organized crime in the country, she resigned in protest.

Hugo Noe Pino paints a similarly bleak picture in Honduras. The former central bank chief says the lack of funding is so extreme that some patients have been left to bring their own screws for surgeries on broken bones in public hospitals.

That’s the sort of horror story that’s often heard nowadays in crisis-torn Venezuela. But Venezuela is broke, having blown through almost its entire stash of hard currency and defaulted on its foreign debt.

Honduras, on the other hand, could easily tap the bond market for additional financing, especially at a time when rock-bottom rates in developed countries are pushing investors to seek better returns elsewhere. So too could Guatemala. Even El Salvador can sell debt at rates roughly in line with those paid by Costa Rica, the playground for American tourists that has been the region’s longtime oasis of stability. But they rarely do. The three countries went two years without selling a single foreign bond among them until Guatemala broke that drought last month.

Fiscal austerity has become such a single-minded priority in these countries — as a means to keep inflation in check and their currencies stable — that even the International Monetary Fund, an institution that’s been pilloried for years for pushing draconian budget cuts, has urged Guatemala to spend more. “There’s an obsession with this issue,” said Ricardo Castaneda, an economist with ICEFI, a Guatemala City-based think tank that focuses on fiscal policy.

Pino, who has also served as Honduras’s finance minister, acknowledged that the government has ramped up spending on security some in a bid to tame the violence but said that it came at the expense of health and education programs. Meantime, housing and transportation projects are often under the condition of political support. “They are done selectively and don’t have a significant impact on levels of poverty,” he said.

Even after the increase in security spending, Honduras still doesn’t rank particularly high on a global scale in this category. None of the three countries do. Where they do top the charts is on homicide rates. A World Bank report places El Salvador first, Honduras second and Guatemala 13th.

“Immigration is a symptom of the diseases we have: violence, lack of economic growth, lack of investments in all of the rural areas,” Nayib Bukele said at a conference in Washington a few weeks before being sworn in as president of El Salvador this month. “People don’t leave their families and country to cross three frontiers and a desert because things are fine.”

Bukele’s predecessor, Salvador Sanchez Ceren, did seek to boost social spending during his five-year term. Congress balked at the idea of taking on additional debt, though, and the legislation died. Morales also made a brief attempt to ratchet up expenditures in Guatemala. He was going to fund it by raising the country’s tax rates, which are among the world’s lowest. But the business community mobilized to quickly kill the plan. The two candidates vying to succeed Morales have pledged to try again to boost spending.

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President Donald Trump’s decision to drop plans for new tariffs on Mexico is rare good news for a world economy that’s being buffeted by escalating US-China trade tensions.

President Donald Trump’s decision to drop plans for new tariffs on Mexico is rare good news for a world economy that’s being buffeted by escalating US-China trade tensions.

Central bank chiefs and finance ministers gathered in Fukuoka, Japan, for meetings of the Group of 20 were quick to welcome Trump’s move, describing it as a clear removal of one of the biggest worries facing companies and investors.

“It’s good that the 5% tariffs won’t now be imposed, and that’s not just good for the US and Mexico, it’s also beneficial for the global economy, “Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda told reporters.

Indonesia Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati described the news as “very plus plus” and said it may signal that the U.S. and China can also reach an agreement in their trade dispute.” We do hope this recognition is going to create a more reasonable policy direction,” Indrawati said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.

Broader concerns over rising protectionism and the U.S.-China trade war is dominating discussions here, with officials warning the dispute continues to hurt growth.  The G-20 communique is still under discussion, with Japanese officials seeking to limit debate over trade in order to keep thing moving, according to a person familiar with the matter.  The host nation is aiming to find consensus on the final wording>

Leading into the meetings, the World Bank cut its 2019 global growth forecast, citing a slowdown in trade growth to the weakest since the financial crisis a decade ago and a drop in global investment. The bank forecast that the world economy will expand 2.6% this year, compared with a projection of 2.9% it made in January.

“There’s no doubt that the escalating trade tensions have weighed on the global economic outlook,” Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told Bloomberg Television Friday. On a panel on Saturday in Fukuoka, China’s Finance Minister Liu Kun warned the world economy is weak.

Still, in a sign that multilateralism is not completely out of fashion, policy makers at the meetings called for continued progress on finding ways to limit international tax evasion.Cooperation “stands out as a case study on how multilateralism can be effective in the face of today’s challenges,” India Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on a panel Saturday. “Multi-laterally is the way to go,” Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, said on the same panel.

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