Cuba: Cuba and US agree to cooperate in environmental protection

Obama administration loosens Cuba embargo with new measures

2016/01/28 The Obama government is loosening the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba with a new round of regulations allowing American companies to sell to Cuba on credit and export a potentially wide range of products to the Cuban government for the initial time, officials said Tuesday. The changes are President Barack Obama's third attempt to spur U.S.-Cuba commerce despite an embargo that still prohibits most forms of trade with the island. U.S. travel to Cuba has exploded since Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro declared detente in 2014. But U.S. hopes of building wider trade between American businesses and Cuba's private sector have been largely frustrated by Congressional reluctance to end the embargo itself and by the island's labyrinthine restrictions on imports, exports and private business.

Global growth will be disappointing in 2016: IMF's Lagarde

2016/01/02 World economic increase will be disappointing next year and the outlook for the medium-term has as well deteriorated, the chief of the International Monetary Fund said in a guest article for German newspaper Handelsblatt published on Wednesday. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said the prospect of rising interest rates in the United States and an economic slowdown in China were contributing to uncertainty and a higher risk of economic vulnerability worldwide. Added to that, increase in world trade has slowed considerably and a decline in raw material prices is posing problems for economies based on these, while the financial sector in a lot of nations still has weaknesses and financial risks are rising in emerging markets, she said.

Cuba’s Dire Need For Foreign Investment: What It Means To Its Developing Economy

2015/12/02 Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and Cuba’s subsequent hardship while transitioning to a additional decentralized economy in its “Appropriate Period,” Cuba has implemented significant economic changes. While preserving socialist gains finished during the Revolution, it has continued to develop elements of capitalism initial employed by Fidel Castro in response to severe economic times in the 1990s. Cuba has undergone a series of recent transformations in its ability and willingness to attract the kind of foreign investment that is essential in developing and sustaining economic increase. Until Fidel Castro began decentralizing national economic control by allowing inflows of foreign capital and other outside investment , the Cuban economy contracted drastically. Next the Soviet Union began to dissolve in 1989, Cuba suffered an immediate 75 to 80 % drop in foreign exchange receipts as Soviet subsidies dried up. Per-capita gain contracted by 34 % from 1990 to 1993 because of a lack of foreign investment and access to international financial institutions, coupled with a hardened U.S. trade embargo.3 Since that Cold War period, Cuba has continuously opened up to foreign investment and has used it to develop struggling elements of the economy. As the Cuban government’s control of the economy has gradually diminished, the island country has seen tremendous improvements in its ability to increase and sustain economic increase.

CARICOM and USAID reach agreement on development assistance for Caribbean

2015/11/27 The United States Agency for International Improvment(USAID) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) today signed agreements that will see nations of the eastern and southern Caribbean benefiting from US$165 million in development assistance. An estimated US$89 million will target the reduction of youth involvement in crime and violence in target communities, while US$52 million is designated to achieving epidemic control of HIV/AIDS part key populations, and $31 million will go towards reducing the risks to human and natural assets resulting from climate vulnerability. CARICOM Secretary General Ambassador Irwin LaRocque and USAID Eastern and Southern Caribbean Mission Director, Christopher Cushing, initialled the five-year Development Objective Agreements (DOAGs) at the CARICOM Secretariat in Guyana.