globalEDGE Blog - Page 73

Around the globe, playing your favorite music, making phone calls, and listening to lectures or podcasts has been made more convenient with the help of one of the world’s most popular products—headphones/earbuds.  Strolling through college campuses, it’s a common sight for students bustling to and from classes to don a pair of earbuds or headphones.  In global workplaces, many employees play music through headphones to increase their focus and achieve better results.  Taking private calls has been greatly aided with the use of earbuds that work much like Bluetooth earpieces but offer much better quality—the noise canceling functionality that many of these products feature to make it simple to tune out background information and allows calls to be made without having to step out of a room.  This coveted usefulness has people around the world buying into the headphone and earbud market.

Canada appears to be taking the brunt of political and economic uncertainty occurring in North America. A potential renegotiation of NAFTA, US tax cuts, and a weakening oil and gas industry are leaving investors wary of future economic growth in Canada. This speculation appears to be a reality for Canada’s Finance Minister Bill Morneau, who forecasted an average annual growth of 1.7% between now and until 2022. This is a rapid change of events for the country, who saw 3.7% economic growth in the past year and the jobless rate hitting a record low.

"This is the final call for the flight to Havana. You should be in your seats with safety belts fastened."

Most Americans never thought they'd hear a message like this on an airplane in their lifetimes, but at one-point last year, dozens of such flights departed airports from across the nation. For example, Alaska Airlines won a route between the U.S. west coast and the Cuban capital.

globalEDGE has added the 2018 Financial Secrecy Index to our growing list of indices in the global insights by country pages. Provided by the Tax Justice Network, the Financial Secrecy Index ranks jurisdictions according to their secrecy and level of offshore financing activities. The index was developed in collaboration with the world’s largest banks, law practices, and accounting firms that are intimately familiar with the secretive offshore financial structures of some of their clients.

International e-commerce are commercial transactions that happen over the internet which involve people or businesses located in different countries.  In the modern world, many consumers now shop online and there are a plethora of opportunities available to market to a potential online international customer.   

Fermented carbohydrates, malted cereal grain, and hops are three essential ingredients to the world’s most common alcoholic beverage, beer. Beer is one of the oldest brewed and consumed beverages across the globe and its demand increasing exponentially. Local breweries have been popping up in cities across the globe featuring a new micro-brewed ale or a new twist on an old classic.

The number of firearms produced and sold in the United States has continued to rise, and according to the Firearms Commerce in the US report produced by the Justice Department, the amount of firearms that are manufactured in the country have tripled since 1968. This may be alarming considering the fact that in the time it took the number of manufactured guns to triple, the US population has only grown by 35%. In 2015 alone, there were about 9,360,000 firearms manufactured in the US. Out of the 9,360,000 firearms that were manufactured in the US, only about 343,000 firearms were exported from the US in 2015, which is less than 4% of the total.

Entrepreneurship is permeating business conversations as more people discover the lasting benefits that come with investing in start-ups. Entrepreneurs are responsible for driving the majority of social and economic innovation across the globe and continue to foster opportunities for growth in mature, emerging and frontier markets alike .

Microwavable TV dinner trays, notebooks, tissues, packages, and newspapers are all derived from one of the world’s most used products—paper.  According to Green America, “40 percent of the world’s industrial logging goes into making paper, and is expected to reach 50 percent in the near future.”  Furthermore, the global consumption of paper has skyrocketed 400 percent in the last four decades, and in the last 20 years alone, the use of paper products has gone up from 92 million tons to 407 million tons in 2014.  The worldwide paper industry is the fifth largest consumer of energy and is credited for four percent of the entire population’s energy use.

There is no doubt that sports never fail to bring the world together. It provides a platform for national unity and city pride. Hosting international sports events such as the Olympics, Fifa World Cup, or the Super Bowl is the reason for a significant amount of economic development in countries. However, these economic developments can be beneficial but also very costly for host countries.