Trade agreements are treaties signed by two or more nations to encourage the free flow of goods and services between the members. These agreements, which can be bilateral or multilateral, reduce or eliminate trade barriers such as tariffs and quotas. As such, they lead to the creation of new markets for businesses, facilitate the production of high-quality goods and enhance economic growth.
There is no alternative to sustainable development. Even so, many companies are convinced that the more environment-friendly they become, the more the effort will erode their competitiveness.
They believe it will add to costs and will not deliver immediate financial benefits. Talk long enough to CEOs, particularly in the United States or Europe, and their concerns will pour out: Making our operations sustainable and developing “green” products places us at a disadvantage vis-à-vis rivals in developing countries that don’t face the same pressures.
Plant-based eating as one on the top trends driving the food and beverage industry. With third of the population actively reducing their meat consumption, the demand for plant-based products is rapidly growing in 2019.
Counteracting the meat and dairy industries commodity boards, non-profit organizations are emerging to support plant-based choices by promoting education, research, and entrepreneurship in the plan-based field.
Trend #1
Battle for technological supremacy. The United States and China have emerged as the dominant players in the race for hegemony in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Divergent technology standards will persist while the competition continues. The winner will have outsized influence—with economic, political, and military implications for years to come.
In a globally connected world characterized by diversity, there exist different approaches towards negotiation, which are dependent on people’s respective culture.
We believe there is a significant impact of culture to negotiation processes, and by exploring three culture types – Dignity Culture, Face Culture and Honor Culture – we can better understand it all.
Luxury brands will be challenged to focus on the human aspect of the digital revolution, as they seek to find traction with the younger, digitally-powered consumers that have come with it.
Market turbulence, slowing sales. At the end of November the Savigny Luxury Index, compiled on the stock values of 18 leading luxury companies, reported a drop in average stock prices to reach a lower level than at the beginning of the year. Citing worries over a decline in Chinese tourism, that government’s heavy-handed enforcement of personal luxury goods’ imports, and the threat of a trade war with the U.S. French investment bank Societe General foresees similar trends, forecasting a “slowdown in the luxury sector has just started as concerns over the spending trend of affluent Chinese millennials and the impact of the Yellow Vest protest in France.” Goldman Sachs concurs and dropped its 2019 forecast for luxury industry sales growth from a previous 7% to 5%. The investment community dislikes any uncertainty and there is plenty of it to go around. A recent survey by J.P. Morgan among ultra-high-net-worth investors (those with more than $30 million in liquid financial assets) found that 75% expect a recession to hit the U.S. by 2020.Even Gucci CEO Marco Bizzarri, who sits on top of the world’s fastest-growing legacy luxury brand, knows the good times can’t last. “We need to recognize the fact that at a certain point we’re going to slow down, we cannot keep on growing 50-60% per month, it’s impossible,” he said in a video to company employees.
The club of emerging political and economic powers of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa in response to new global challenges is famously known as BRICS. Since its inception in 2006, it has been a platform to highlight the prominence of multi-polar world order challenging the collision of G-7 members.
These five countries account for 20% of world GDP and 40% of the world population. Further, they hold 40% of gold and hard currency reserves. Being collectively the largest market, their cumulative GDP has tripled in the last ten years.
China is the second largest economy in the world and as such, its economic and trade environment is always at the focus of economists.
Recently however, China has found itself even more at the spotlight than usual, with the hottest topic for anyone with a remote interest in economy being the ongoing “trade war” between China and the USA.
Israel’s economy has undergone several transformations since its founding. Oranges symbolized the country’s exports until the 1970s. Textiles also played an important role at the time. Now the high-tech boom that Israel has been experimenting for about two decades has the potential to make it one of the best places in the world for the productive sector. As a country so small, smaller than the Brazilian state of Sergipe, in the northeast region, can be benchmarked in innovation, science and technology? And what can you learn from Israel’s management model that can impact the way you run your business overseas?
Yemen is four years into an unprecedented civil war. The fighting left the country, which was already one of the poorest among the Arabs, on the verge of a hunger crisis which, according to the United Nations, affects up to 14 (fourteen) million people. The NGO Save The Children believes that about 85 (eighty-five) thousand children under the age of five have already died of malnutrition in these four years. In addition, the economic capacity of the Yemenis is “nonexistent”. Throwing light on the issue is essential for people throughout the world to realize how serious the situation in Yemen is, and the consequences of what is already the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet.