The World Economic Forum‘s “Inclusive Growth and Development Report 2017,” released Monday, said that most countries are missing important opportunities to raise economic growth and reduce inequality at the same time because the growth model and measurement tools that have guided policymakers for decades require significant readjustment.The Inclusive Development Index is based on 12 performance indicators. In order to provide a more complete measure of economic development than gross domestic pr

Eight men own the same wealth as half the world’s population, a level of inequality which “threatens to pull our societies apart,” Oxfam said.The wealth of the world’s poorest 3.6 billion people is the equivalent to the combined net worth of six American businessmen, one from Spain and another from Mexico.Picked from Forbes’ billionaires list, they include Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg who co-founded Facebook and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.Oxfam pointed to a link between the v

Mexico ranked top as the best place to retire in 2017, according to InternationalLiving.com’s new Annual Global Retirement Index.Panama and Ecuador consistently rank among the top places to retire. The index evaluates countries across 10 categories, looking at factors such as visas, health care, climate and property, among others. The one with the highest total score is deemed top.

Sales of desktop and laptop computers declined last year, continuing a decline that began in 2012, according to figures released Wednesday by two market trackers.Preliminary figures from Gartner indicated that PC shipments last year tallied 269.7 million units, a 6.2 percent decrease from the previous year. International Data Corp. put the number of machines shipped last year at 260 million units, a 5.7 percent drop from the previous year.China-based Lenovo remained the leader in the global PC m

  

China has found two more cases of human bird flu infection H7N9, bringing this week’s total to three and stoking fears the deadly virus could spread at a time as other Asian nations are battling to control outbreaks of the disease. Health officials in South Korea and Japan have been scrambling to contain outbreaks of different strains of bird flu, with the poultry industry bracing for heavy financial losses.A total of 809 laboratory-confirmed human infections with the H7N9 bird flu virus have be

The price of soju leaped 11.7 percent in 2016 from the year before, the highest rate of increase since recordkeeping began in 2000, a statistical agency said Monday.The cost of eating out on average was up 2.5 percent from the previous year, as the prices of popular dishes, including beef and raw fish, were raised in the 4 percent range. The only food item whose prices declined was locally made tea, which dropped 0.1 percent, statistics showed.

  

Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific retained its top spot as the air carrier with the best safety record last year, according to the German-founded Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Center.Air New Zealand came in second, while Hainan Airlines was third. China Airlines took the bottom spot, ranking 60th. 　The JACDEC researchers looked at airlines’s records, cross-referencing with the number of accidents and total losses over 30 years.

South Korea‘s average temperature hit a record high last year due to climate change, which has also caused the world to see the highest-ever annual average temperatures, the weather agency said. The median temperature was 13.6 Celsius between January and November, 1.1 degrees higher than usual, the Korea Meteorological Administration said. The figure was the highest since 1973, when the country completed the establishment of 45 weather observation centers nationwide, the agency said.

Some 3,000 people started their own business per day in 2014, but over two-thirds of them had closed down a year later, statistics from the National Tax Service showed Monday.Based on the number of new businesses that filed value-added taxes for the first time in 2015, close to 1.07 million people became self-employed on a daily average in 2014. But by the following year, 739,000 people had closed their businesses, an average of 2,000 per day, the tally showed.The new businesses were heavily con

India is leading as Asia’s fastest-growing large economy and it will continue to be on that track in early 2017 growing at 7.6 percent, according to the Asian Development Bank Outlook 2016 report.Myanmar continued its growth in 2016 despite witnessing a cyclone and intense rains that caused widespread flooding and landslides displacing over 1.6 million people, devastating one-fifth of all cultivated land, in 2015.The ADB’s flagship annual economic publication, Asian Development Outlook 2016, sai

Nearly 600,000 employees received a nine-figure salary last year, up 13.3 percent from the previous year, the National Tax Service said Wednesday.The average salary of employees in South Korea was about 32.5 million won ($26,900)The increase rate of the number of nine-figure salary earners had reached as high as 42.3 percent in 2010, but the rate has remained at around 10 percent since 2012. They took up 3.4 percent of the entire workers who had their year-end tax adjusted last year.By region, w

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute launched its annual set of nuclear forces data, which highlights current trends and developments in world nuclear arsenals. The data shows that while the overall number of nuclear weapons in the world continues to decline, none of the nuclear weapon-possessing states are prepared to give up their nuclear arsenals in the foreseeable future.At the start of 2016, nine states -- the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and No

The number of foreign tourists visiting South Korea is expected to reach a record high of 17 million this year on the back of a sharp increase in Chinese tourists, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism said Monday.The number of foreign tourists arriving in South Korea fell 6.8 percent on-year in 2015, due to the spread of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome virus.In the first 11 months of this year, the number of foreign tourists jumped 31.2 percent on-year, according to the ministry data