Business and Finance News

On Tuesday leading indicators published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) showed that based on January data, economic activity continued to point to continuing slowdowns in the US, the UK, Canada and Russia, with addit…

Women earned on average 16% less than men in the EU in 2014. Estonia had the highest gap at 28%, Germany was third highest at 22% while there was no data for Ireland and Greece.

The US and Singapore are once again the most attractive destinations for Chinese outbound investment. This is the key finding of the 2015 China Going Global Index (GGI), published this year by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The European Patent Office reported in its annual report published last week that the inventiveness of Europe’s leading economies is reflected in the ratio of European patent applications filed to population and Switzerland again topped the ranking in …

Euro Area retail sales rose in January according to Eurostat today but composite PMI (purchasing managers’ index) survey data for February comprising activity in both manufacturing and services, fell to a 13-month low while French data fell below the n…

The volatility in global markets in the first two months of 2016 has resulted in negative returns for Irish pensions and the performance over the past 12 months was also in the red.

Later this month complete export data for 2015 will be released and after a total vale of €215bn in 2014, the value in 2015 may have been up to €250bn with indigenous exports including tourism and transport accounting for less than €30bn. While the total export value of €158bn in 2007 is not directly comparable with more recent data because of a change in methodology, still the increase would be enough to have official spinners and their yarn merchants salivating on superlatives. However, not only should last Friday’s election washout for the governing parties lead to a questioning of the relentless public propaganda using distorted data but there is also a reality that exports are not a significant jobs engine for the Irish economy.

The conventional wisdom that at least Fine Gael, the senior party in the outgoing governing coalition government, would reap the benefit of the Irish economic recovery in last Friday’s general election, has been upended. As the count proceeds, Fianna Fáil, the architect of the property-fuelled boom and bust, has almost matched the Fine Gael vote, and after its near death experience in the 2011 general election, the once long-dominant political party can claim to have made one of the political comebacks that for political journalists at least merits comparison with Lazarus, the biblical character.

Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary for long took pleasure in tweaking the tails of the fat cats of the establishment but as some British business leaders this week shied away from taking a public stance on Brexit — the shorthand that combines the words Britain and exit from the European Union, which British voters will decide on via a referendum on 23 June, 2016 — O’Leary made a strong call for an anti-Brexit vote.

France is seeking €1.6bn in back taxes from Google, the US Internet search giant, according to a source at the finance ministry in Paris, reported by Reuters on Wednesday. In London also on Wednesday, the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said in a report that a settlement by Google with the HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) that was announced last month “seems disproportionately small when compared with the size of Google’s business in the UK, reinforcing our concerns that the rules governing where corporation tax is paid by multinational companies do not produce a fair outcome.”