PRAGUE, Czech Republic, Dec. 12--Growing interest in shares on the stock exchanges of central and eastern Europe has pushed them to record levels, making them among the best-performing in the world.
The admission of their governments to the European Union in May, the combination of emerging but increasingly stable markets as well as attractive companies have lured increasing numbers of investors from abroad.
The Bratislava Stock Exchange is up 77 percent since the start of the year, while both Budapest and Tallinn grew 53 percent. Prague Stock Exchange meanwhile is up 49 percent, with the PX 50 index last month breaching its base level of 1,000 points for the first time in ten and a half years.
The Warsaw Stock Exchange reached a record high of 26,107 points on December 2 and the Tallinn Stock Exchange's TALSE index is at its highest since the market crash of 1997.
"The accession to the European Union put Hungary and other countries in the region in the investor spotlight and this poured fresh capital into the stock market as well. Foreign investors are starting to no longer think in emerging markets but in sectors or even companies," Kornel Szabo Sarkadi, a securities analyst at Raiffeisen Bank in Budapest, told AFP.
"But more than EU accession, the outstanding performance of the stock market is due to selective large companies, such as banking firm OTP and oil company Mol, showing huge profits which have caught the imagination of investors," he added.
According to Jan Langmayer, head of trading at Prague brokerage Atlantik, foreign investment funds and particularly those from the United States are increasingly interested in Czech stocks.
"The main lure of the Czech stock market is that all of the traded companies are performing so well and reporting much better results than their western European counterparts," he added.
Warsaw's stock exchange is Europe's third largest for Initial Public Offerings after London and Euronext, says the exchange's spokesman Dariusz Marszalek.

NICOSIA, Cyprus, Dec. 12--Saudi Arabia should cut its crude oil production by 475,000 barrels per day, almost half the planned OPEC cut of one million bpd designed to counter falling prices, the Middle East Economic Survey (MEES) said Saturday, AFP reported.
In a special edition covering Friday's OPEC ministerial talks in Cairo, the specialist bulletin added that six other members of the oil organization should share the remaining cut of 525,000 bpd.
It said the United Arab Emirates should cut its output by 126,000 bpd, followed by Nigeria (120,000), Kuwait (118,000), Libya (78,000), Algeria (46,000), and finally Qatar (37,000).
The Cairo meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) decided the one million bpd production cut should start from January 1, 2005.

Gordon Brown

LONDON, Dec 12--British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown said Sunday that wealthy countries had a moral obligation to help combat poverty around the world, AFP reported.
Brown said an "enlightened self-interest" should lead the richest nations to improve the lot of the poor, in an interview to be shown on ITV television later Sunday.
"But I think there's also a bigger moral reason. I think all of us share in one way a moral sense that poverty disfigures people, that deprivation diminishes people, that human dignity requires that we do something about either the debt or the poverty or the unfair trade that means so many people have not even got a first chance in life," he said.
"It is to the benefit of the richest countries to invest in the poorest and allow them to develop in such a way that they can make a contribution to the growth of world consuming power and the growth of world trade," he said.
Brown last week declared 2005 a "make-or-break" year for combating poverty, and committed Britain to a "new Marshall plan" for the developing world.
Britain assumes the helm of the Group of Eight club of the world's wealthiest nations in 2005 and, beginning in July, the six-month rotating presidency of the 25-member European Union.
Prime Minister Tony Blair has repeatedly pledged to use Britain's leadership of those two leading organizations to advance development, particularly in Africa.
Earlier, the finance minister said Britain would work to secure major debt relief for poor countries and to drum up between 50 and 100 billion dollars (40 and 75 billion euros) from loans made in the capital markets to fund essential services and infrastructure-building in the poorest countries.
He also said Blair's government would work to advance research into vaccines for malaria and AIDS, and to complete the Doha round of global trade negotiations, in order to level the playing field for agricultural exports from developing nations.

WASHINGTON,
Dec. 12--US textile manufacturers are digging in for legal warfare to survive after the January 1, 2005 end of import quotas, which have so far held back a flood of "Made in China" garments, AFP reported.
A system of import quotas that has dominated the world textiles trade since the early 1960s is being phased out at the end of this year, leaving the necks of US producers vulnerable to China's sharp competitive edge.
Already, in 2004, China-made textiles are expected to rise by more than 25 percent from the 12 billion dollars' worth imported the year before, and US producers fear an end to all quotas would be disastrous.
"We conducted a study: We are talking about 600,000 US jobs that could be lost in the textile, apparel, fiber related industries in the next few years," said National Council of Textile Organizations president Robert DuPress.
"China could wipe out entire segments of the US industry."
Textile makers contribute to US tax revenue and support local economies, often as the only major employer, he said.
But the quotas, enshrined in the 1974 Multifiber Arrangement and later in the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, expire at the end of this year.
"We are only looking at China and may be one or two other countries being winners, everybody else will be losers," predicted Dupress.
"Our government and the WTO must work together to force China to change its predatory trade practices, to stop its currency manipulation to gain advantage, to stop its blatant subsidization of its industry," he said.
One of the biggest hopes for Chinese competitors in the United States and elsewhere is a special "safeguard arrangement," which China agreed on during its entry negotiation with the WTO in 2001. According to the arrangement, a WTO member can carry on limiting Chinese textile imports if they may cause "market disruptions" or threaten to impede "the orderly development of trade".
Indeed, in the runup to the end of 2004, US textile manufacturers have filed a slew of requests for protection from imports of Chinese-made bras, wool trousers, cotton shirts, blouses and dressing gowns they claim would disrupt the market.

An employee at the Wipro Spectramind call center in New Delhi, India (AFP Photo)

NEW DELHI, India, Dec. 12--An estimated 300,000 mainly young people work in India's booming outsourcing industry, which is set to grow 40 percent in 2005, according to an industry study, AFP reported.
Technically, it is called business process outsourcing and includes sales call centers, back office work like accounting and customer service.
A study by the National Association of Software and Service Companies, an Indian-industry lobby group, projects business process outsourcing could quadruple to 1.2 million jobs by 2008 and bring in revenues of 21 to 24 billion dollars.
The spending patterns and the legions of women workers in an industry barely five years old is changing the cultural landscape of India and providing opportunity to an increasingly young population where almost half the one billion people are under age 35.
The staff at the Wipro Spectramind center in New Delhi that services customers of a US-based computer manufacturer and an Internet service provider in Britain, is almost half female. They arrive for their nine and a half hour shifts after getting picked up at home in the early evening by company-provided transport and work the head-set phones with quick breaks for tea, Diet Pepsi and potato chips, which they can work off at a company-provided gym when their shifts end early in the morning.
Raman Roy, chairman and managing director at Wipro Spectramind, said the changes for women workers don't stop with the urge to splurge. "Forty two percent of our work force are females," Roy said in an interview. "This is causing a huge transformation in our society. " "But for all the boom times for bright English-speaking youngsters, the majority of the young population, easily more than 200 million people, are outside the loop, Roy said.
"Out of every 100 we interview, we hire 10 or 11. At our seven locations last month, we had 18,000 people interviewed and hired 1,500," Roy said.
Wipro Spectramind currently has 13,000 employees not counting a 1,000-strong transport fleet and hundreds of support staff.
Roy said the company steps in to train people in many skills, including understanding how credit cards are used and US accounting standards.
"Our biggest expense is on training," Roy said

LISBON, Portugal, Dec. 12--The European Commission's decision to block a merger between's Portugal's dominant electricity and gas utilities has undermined Lisbon's efforts to restructure its energy sector ahead of the creation of a single energy market with Spain, AFP reported.
Portugal's state-controlled oil company Galpenergia had proposed selling 51 percent of its gas firm GDP to former state electricity monopoly EDP and the other 49 percent to Italian energy group ENI for 1.2 billion euros.
The proposed restructuring of Portugal's energy sector was a pet project of the previous center-right government of Jose Manuel Barroso, who resigned in July to become the next head of the European Commission.
Barroso's successor, former Lisbon mayor Pedro Santana Lopes, continued to back the strategy, arguing that the merger of the electricity and gas groups would be good for consumers and make the sector more competitive.
But on Thursday European Union Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes blocked the deal saying it would give EDP too much control over Portugal's gas and electricity markets.
It was the first time in three years the commission has blocked a proposed merger.
"Ensuring effective competition in newly-liberalized markets such as energy is a priority for me, to prevent companies clubbing together to neutralize the effects of new market access," she told a news conference in Brussels.
Barroso, who took office as the head of the new 25-member Commission last month, abstained from voting. Although the move had been widely expected, it was a blow to the Portuguese government and EDP, the country's largest industrial group, which has invested heavily in an expansion into the Spanish market.
Reacting to the Brussels decision, Portuguese Economy Minister Alvaro Barreto said he might support an appeal against the European Commission's veto of the deal.
"If the documentation shows that an appeal is well-founded, I will certainly support it," he told Lisbon-based TSF radio. The government had argued the merger should be seen in the context of a single Spanish and Portuguese energy market, which it expects will become fully operational in 2008.

SINGAPORE,
Dec. 12--A new found warmth between Singapore and Malaysia has opened the door for the two neighbors to forge closer business partnerships after almost four decades of rocky ties, analysts said, AFP reported.
With former Singapore premier Goh Chok Tong due to meet Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi on Monday, the two neighbors are finally putting aside their long-standing differences in favor of economic cooperation, they said.
Goh, who stepped down for Lee Hsien Loong in August, is traveling to Kuala Lumpur for the first time in his role as Singapore's special envoy to Malaysia, a position created in October to capitalize on rapidly improving relations.
Separated by the narrow Johor Strait, the two nations have endured an uneasy relationship since Singapore's traumatic ejection from the Malaysian federation in 1965.
Among the wide range of disputes to have held back closer economic cooperation are the price of raw water that Malaysia supplies to Singapore and rival claims to a rocky islet.
The future of Malaysian-owned railway land inside Singapore, land reclamation works by Singapore and a proposed new bridge linking the two countries are other issues to have hampered ties.
The famously feisty former Malaysia prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, also had an enduringly testy relationship with Singapore's leaders.
"Ever since Badawi took over, we have noticed a perceptible shift in KL (Kuala Lumpur) dealings with Singapore at the higher level," said Song Seng Wun, a regional economist with G.K. Goh brokerage in Singapore.
"It appears both sides are willing to move forward... bottomline is it is better for both sides to be working together at the higher level than be at each other's throats. "The world around us is changing too fast so they have to put economic survival ahead of petty squabbles."
Goh and other analysts said investments from Singapore's state investment firms in Malaysia this year are firm indications that the neighbors are increasingly placing economic interests ahead of their differences.
It was announced last month that the Government of Singapore Investment Corp. (GIC), which manages the city-state's foreign reserves of more than 100 billion US dollars, had bought a 5.04 percent stake in Malaysian national car maker Proton Holdings for an undisclosed price.