LONDON, March 18--Some 600 million people in Asia live on less than a dollar a day. Yet this fast-growing region stands a very good chance of eliminating poverty in a decade, the Independent quoted a World Bank report as saying on Friday.
It can happen if China and India maintain their current rapid rate of growth (8-10 per cent annual growth in GDP), and bring the rest of Asia along with them, say Shantayanan Devarajan and Homi Kharas, Chief World Bank Economists for South Asia and East Asia, respectively.
Terming the infrastructure bottlenecks, as the major impediment in the way of attaining the desired growth the economists said, Asian countries will have to go down the same path they have already traveled--further opening up their economies to trade, harnessing the private sector, and continuing fiscal, regulatory, trade and financial sector reforms.
“But now growth needs to be “more widely shared,“ Devarajan and Kharas said adding that since 80 percent of Asia’s poor live in rural areas, agricultural growth will be the key.
But Asia needs to deal with “infrastructure bottlenecks“ which are seen as a major barrier to investment, they said adding that rural infrastructure, land rights, rural credit and better prices for agricultural products will contribute to higher incomes for Asia’s farmers.
Devarajan and Kharas estimate $250 billion must be spent annually over the next decade to improve the region’s infrastructure. Countries likely won’t be able to finance all of this and need to attract private-sector funds to the projects, they say.
Asia also needs a healthy, skilled and productive work force to sustain growth. The region will have to improve educational and medical services “by holding politicians and providers more accountable to citizens, especially poor citizens,“ Devarajan and Kharas say.
Financial aid from the international community has helped boost growth, but what’s needed even more now is “knowledge assistance,“ they say. The World Bank and other organizations are exploring partnerships with Asian countries that result in joint problem-solving, so that “solutions come from within,“ Devarajan says.
Devarajan and Kharas expect partnerships between industrial countries and developing Asia to continue to flourish “as Asian countries become a bigger market for European, Japanese and American exports--and an excellent destination for foreign investment--while Asians continue to sell their products abroad.“

NEW YORK,
March 18--OPEC lowered its demand forecast for this year and amid signs that US crude oil inventories are growing, AP reported.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries lowered its forecast Friday for global oil demand growth in 2006 by 110,000 barrels a day. OPEC, which cited lower consumption in the US and Asia, said its prediction comes after signs of larger oil inventories in the US, along with higher demand in January and February.
Light sweet crude for April delivery dropped 81 cents to settle at $62.77 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The price had jumped $1.41 Thursday to settle at $63.58 a barrel on news over the US-led attack in Iraq and US concerns over Iran.
Brent crude for May fell 95 cents to settle at $63.26 a barrel on London’s ICE Futures exchange.
Nymex gasoline futures fell 1.43 cent to finish at $1.8601 per gallon (3.8 liters). Heating oil futures slipped 3.12 cents to $1.7813 a gallon. Natural gas futures fell 21.4 cents to $7.053 per 1,000 cubic feet.
OPEC set oil demand growth for this year at 1.46 million barrels a day and demand for the year at 84.5 million barrels a day. This brings its estimate in line with recent revisions by agencies such as the International Energy Agency and the Energy Information Administration.
David Thurtell, a commodity strategist with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney, said oil prices had gone up a “fair bit in recent days“ on concerns about the conflict in Iraq and troubles in Nigeria.
“But stocks have been building nicely,“ he said, referring to the US Energy Department’s weekly report that showed crude oil inventories rose by 4.8 million barrels last week to 339.9 million barrels, or 10 percent above year-ago levels.
Oil prices are about 12 percent higher than a year ago, reflecting worries about the stability of supplies from Iran, Nigeria and elsewhere.
In Nigeria, output has been disrupted by a wave of militant attacks over the last two months that has forced the country to cut daily exports by 20 percent. A militant group, demanding a great share of wealth from the oil pumped from its land, has threatened more attacks.

The project, which is expected to cost at least $800 million, will allow Russia to export oil through the Black Sea bypassing the busy Bosporus Strait in Turkey.

ATHENS, Greece, March 18--Greece and Russia plan to accelerate work on a major energy project that will allow the latter to export oil to Europe in circumvention of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, the Greek development ministry said Friday.
According to Ria Novosti, the Russian, Bulgarian and Greek governments signed a memorandum on the construction of a pipeline stretching for 280 kilometers (175 miles) from the Bulgarian port of Burgas on the Black Sea to Greece’s Alexandroupolis on the Aegean in April 2005. The project, which is expected to cost at least $800 million, will allow Russia to export oil through the Black Sea bypassing the busy Bosporus Strait in Turkey. Initial throughput capacity will be 35 metric million tons (255 million bbl) metric tons of oil before rising to 50 million tons (370 million bbl).
Greek Development Minister Dimitris Sioufas met in Athens with a Russian delegation led by Anatoly Yanovsky, the head of the fuel and energy department of the Russian Ministry of Industry and Energy. The delegation also included representatives from Russian-British joint venture TNK-BP, state-owned oil company Rosneft, and energy giant Gazprom.
“During the meeting, the process of implementing the Burgas-Alexandroupolis project was discussed in detail,“ the Greek ministry said. “The sides agreed to take measures in the near future to speed up the implementation of this project.“
The next meeting between the three countries involved in the project will take place in Athens in April, the ministry said.
The list of Russian companies to be involved in the project has not yet been clarified. During a visit to the Greek capital in February 2006, Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller said the company was interested in participating in the project, but had not yet reached a final decision.

UK employment is up on the year, vacancies are up again this quarter and redundancies are at historically low levels.

LONDON, March 18-- The number of people out of work in the UK rose 37,000 to 1.53 million between November and January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS figures also showed that the number of people out of work and claiming benefits rose by 14,600 in February to 919,700, BBC News website reported.
The claimant count rise is the biggest increase since December 1992.
ONS figures also showed that average earnings in the three months to January were 3.5% higher than a year earlier.
This helped ease worries highlighted by the Bank of England that big pay deals were threatening to push up inflation.
The number of unemployed people has risen by 109,000 in the last 12 months, and now stands at 5% of the UK population.
“The fundamentals remain strong,“ said Margaret Hodge, Minister of State for Employment and Welfare Reform.
“Employment is up on the year, vacancies are up again this quarter and redundancies are at historically low levels.“
She said the rise in people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance was offset partly by a fall in the number of people claiming incapacity and lone parent benefits.
The number of unemployed people claiming benefits has risen by 0.3 percentage points over the last twelve months, and stands at 2.9% of the population.

TOKYO, March 18--Japan’s Marubeni Corp. and its local partners are in the final stages of negotiations to acquire two coal-mining firms in Indonesia from PT Bumi Resources Tbk for about 3.2 billion dollars, a report said Saturday.
The consortium, led by Indonesian firm Renaissance Capital, plans to buy PT Arutmin Indonesia and PT Kaltim Prima Coal (KPC), the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported, quoting trading house Marubeni’s president Nobuo Katsumata.
According to AFP, the report followed the Indonesian coal miner’s announcement
Friday that it had sold stakes in two of its units for 3.2 billion dollars to Borneo Lumbung Energi, a unit of Renaissance Capital.
It is the first time Marubeni has been linked to the acquisition.
With the planned purchase, Marubeni is aiming to export coal to China and Japan where demand is increasing, the report said. It also plans to build a coal-fired power plant in Indonesia.
Marubeni officials were not immediately available for comment.
Bumi Resources sold a 95 percent stake in KPC and a 100 percent stake in Arutmin in an agreement signed Thursday.

ROME, March 18--Italian employers, bemoaning the country’s economic decline, voiced a favorable impression of the center-left opposition leader Romano Prodi during a debate in the northern city of Vicenza, AFP reported.
Prodi, a former president of the European Commission, who has said he would “correct“ the tax on businesses, also renewed his promise to reduce labor costs.
“I am very satisfied,“ said the head of the Italian employers’ union Luca Cordero di Montezemolo at the end of the debate on issues in the upcoming April 9-10 legislative elections.
It was the second debate victory for Prodi, after having dominated his rival incumbent Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in a televised face-to-face on Tuesday.
Some 5,000 Italian industrialists heard Prodi’s responses to their questions at the gathering in Vincenza.
“I asked the industrialists to choose, to make a decision, because the problems facing this country are not only the concern of government, but a matter for everyone,“ said Prodi, who is the expected winner of the election.
The business leaders held a very tough view of the Italian economy.
“For the first time since after the war, Italy risks distancing itself from the group of the most industrialized nations. That’s serious and must be avoided,“ said Andrea Pininfarina, vice-president of Confindustria, the Italian employers’ group.

SANTIAGO, Chile, March 18--The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean said on Friday it had raised the 2006 growth forecast for the region to 4.3 percent, from an earlier prediction of 4.1 percent.
According to Xinhuanet, lower interest rates in some of the region’s main economies, including Mexico and Brazil, had created a more optimistic scenario, Jose Luis Machinea, head of the UN commission, told reporters.
Mexico and Argentina, in particular, would grow more than the commission’s forecast published in December, he said.
Meanwhile, Chile was also likely to put up a good performance and achieve an economic growth of 6 percent, up from the previously estimated 5.5 percent, said Machinea.
In 2005, the economy in the region as a whole grew by 4.3 percent, and many countries surpassed earlier estimates and paved the way for better performance this year, he added.