In case you weren’t one of the 700 million-plus fans to watch the World Cup Finals yesterday, Spain beat the Netherlands 1-0 in extra time. But the España football stars weren’t the only winners–and certainly the Holland footballers were not the only losers. Companies around the world were competing to increase brand awareness and boost profits–here’s FastCompany’s list of the winners and losers.
Tag Archive for 'Europe'
For the first time since Bloomberg BusinessWeek began its annual Most Innovative Companies ranking in 2005, the majority of corporations in the Top 25 are based outside the U.S.
Respectively, 12 are from the US and 13 from outside US with notably companies from South-Korea. The reason: the new global leaders coming out of Asia. However, a bit worrisome are companies from Europe, the first company on the list is ranked 16.
Please find the complete list here. Also check out this HBS working knowledge article from 2005 on “The Rise of Innovation in Asia“.
Follow live coverage of the DLD in Munich, Germany, a gathering of 800 entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, scientists, artists and creative minds from around the world.
With global diversity in attendees and an interdisciplinary perspective of digital, media, design, art, science, brands, consumers and society, the conference is known as the European forum for the “creative class”. Follow live coverage here.
A snapshot of initiatives by European companies on how they capture and employ social media into their marketing and online activities can be found here.
Its positive to notice that companies adopt new technologies and web-service as an integral part of business to reach consumers in a more targeted way.
Shortly after midday on January 20th, Barack Obama will sit for the first time at the desk where the buck stops. The American presidency is always the world’s hardest and most consequential job, but it seems particularly so this month. A global recession of a severity not seen for perhaps 80 years; a new war in the Middle East and old ones in Africa; missions very far from accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan; a prickly Russia and a rising China.
These international challenges must jostle for the president’s attention alongside noisy domestic concerns like rocketing unemployment, the desperate need for a better health-care system, exploding deficits and failing cities. The burdens, surely, are too many for one man to bear.
Global economic meetings used to mean the G7 and then the G8. However, last weekend marked the emergence of a new phenomenon the G20. Which have set stage for the beginning of a better multilateral economic system.
It used to be a rich-country affair with Russia invited in during in the 1990s – but that was to tackle international political issues, not for the sake of a contribution to the economic discussions. However times have changed. A global economic problem needed a presence from developing country leaders.
This being said. In light of aforementioned, last weekend, Presidents and prime ministers from a score of rich and emerging economies descended on Washington, DC, ostensibly to remake the rules of global finance. They came to Washington, as countries hit by the developed world’s financial crisis and, in some cases, as countries that might be able to help fix it.
The G20 (more formally, the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors), created after the emerging-market crises a decade ago, is not perfect for today’s problems. It excludes a big economy with an admired system of financial regulation (Spain) but includes a mid-sized country that has become irrelevant to global finance because of its own mismanagement (Argentina). Still, the G20 includes most of the key parts of the rich and emerging world, making it a better forum for global economic co-operation than the G7 group of rich countries, which has until now held the stage (Source: The Economist).
A recapitulation and highlights of the G20 meeting can be found here:
- BBC News: G20 summit: In quotes
- BBC News: G20 declaration: Full text
Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday November 4th 2008, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.
Hopefully Obama will reinvent America and ties better balanced international relations especially with Europe in order to seriously address global challenges such as climate change, countering poverty, further enhancing economic integration, etc.
You can find more on the 2008 USA Presidential elections here.
Today is the 10th anniversary of the agreement that launched the single currency. However, residents of the first 12 EU states that adopted the Euro didn’t begin using Euro banknotes and coins until 1 January, 2002.
When the euro was launched there were plenty of people who thought it would crash and burn. Ten years on, its role as a global currency is secure, even if it hasn’t achieved everything its founders hoped such as higher living standards (per capita income) and less divergence between national economies. But it has achieved macroeconomic stability and financial stability when reflecting to the recent credit crunch.
There are now 15 European countries who are members of the Eurozone, with a common currency, the Euro, and a single interest rate set by the European Central Bank (ECB). They make up 72% of the EU’s GDP. Click here for the Eurozone in figures.
The International Monetary Fund has come out with its latest set of forecasts of the world economy. The report says at one point:
“The IMF staff now sees a 25 percent chance that global growth will drop to 3 percent or less in 2008 and 2009—equivalent to a global recession.”
Since when is 3% growth equivalent to a “global recession”? According to my textbook, periods of negative GDP growth are called recessions.
By this “new’ definition, the world economy has been in recession 1980-83, 1990-93, 1998, and 2001-2002. In other words, 11 out of the last 28 years. There are no negative years of world growth.
Here are the IMF’s latest world growth numbers, and forecasts out to 2013.
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