President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (l) talks with his UAE counterpart Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahayan in Abu Dhabi, May 13.

Thousands of Iranian firms continue doing business with top trading partner United Arab Emirates.
As reported by Middle-East-Online.com, thousands of Iranian firms are still doing business with the country’s top trading partner, the United Arab Emirates, despite a desperate US drive to choke Tehran’s economy over its nuclear program.

According to the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Iran was the largest market for its members last year, with non-oil exports totaling a massive $9.8 billion.

Iranian businesses “have not had any problem with local banks because we are considered UAE companies“ under local rules requiring at least 51 percent of a business to be owned by an Emirati national, said Nasser Hashempour, executive deputy president of the Dubai-based Iranian Business Council.
The same goes for fully Iranian-owned firms operating out of free zones “because they are registered in the UAE and their sponsor is the free zone,“ which would withdraw their license if they flouted the rules, he said.
Similarly, foreign banks with branches in the UAE continue to deal with firms that have Iranian partners, “but they are more cautious--they scrutinize them more when extending facilities,“ Hashempour said.
However, certain international banks, including British-Asian bank HSBC, Deutsche Bank and Swiss giants UBS and Credit Suisse, have stopped dealing with Iran in line with the illegal sanctions imposed by the United States to pressure Tehran into halting its program of uranium enrichment.
Washington has blacklisted Iran’s three main banks--Melli, Mellat and Saderat--for allegedly handling financial services for its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and/or acting as a conduit for the so-called “terrorist financing“--a baseless charge that Washington is yet to prove.
Hashempour said banks Melli and Saderat are still operating in the UAE and its Persian Gulf Cooperation Council partners--Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia--but that some of their operations are hampered by the refusal of foreign banks to accept letters of credit they issue or otherwise deal with them.
The oil-rich UAE is a US ally but it also has wide-ranging links with its neighbor across the strategic Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.
There are an estimated 450,000 Iranians living in the UAE out of a total population of more than 4.1 million. About 10,000 Iranian firms operate in the country, chiefly Dubai, according to Iranian figures.
Iranian embassy statistics put bilateral trade at $11.7 billion in the Iranian year ending in March 2007, with imports from the UAE forming the bulk of the exchanges at $9.2 billion.
The embassy expects bilateral trade to rise to about 14 billion dollars by the end of the current Iranian year (March 19).
UAE figures corroborate this projection. According to the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Iran was the largest market for its members last year, with non-oil exports totaling a massive $9.8 billion--a 33.4 percent increase on $7.3 billion in exports in 2006.
“Iranians in the UAE also have accumulated assets estimated at more than $300 billion,“ Hashempour said.

World leaders have criticized African countries for falling far short of the 7 percent annual growth that needs to be sustained to make substantial inroads into poverty.

Benchmarks used by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are misrepresentative of the progress made by African countries and contribute to an international stereotype of “African failure“, according to a study presented at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank.
“You’ve got this MDG machine that turns African good news into African bad news,“ said the study’s author, William Easterly, a New York University economist and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Program on Global Economy & Development. “Africa has enough problems without international organizations and campaigners downplaying African progress when it happens.“
According to Ipsnews.net, a key point raised by the study is the fact that the United Nations originally established the MDGs as a set of benchmarks to measure global progress--not the progress of countries or regions, Easterly said. This skews the results of individual countries’ development achievements when their progress is measured up against global indicators.
In agreement with these findings is Jan Vandemoortele, a UN officer who co-chaired the inter-agency group that compiled the MDGs in 2001.
“Assessing whether progress is ’on track’ for meeting the 2015 targets can only be done at the global level,“ Vandemoortele wrote in a 2007 essay for the UN World Institute of Development Economic Research.
Indeed, UN annual reports on progress on the MDGs are offered by region and by country. According to the 2007 UN report on Africa and the Millennium Development Goals, “At the midway point between their adoption in 2000 and the 2015 target date for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, sub-Saharan Africa is not on track to achieve any of the Goals.“
This conclusion does not account for the lack of a “level playing field“ among disparate countries, Easterly said, insofar as the MDG benchmarks pose a disproportionately higher challenge for poorer nations than for nations that start with higher development baselines.
According to the study, one example of this lies in the fourth MDG, which focuses on reducing child mortality by two-thirds. This benchmark can pose a daunting challenge to a country that has a baseline rate of 150 deaths per 1,000, as compared with a richer country whose initial rate may lie at 24 deaths per 1,000. The former is faced with the task of reducing its rate by 100 deaths, while the latter needs only to reduce its rate by 16 in order to meet the same two-thirds benchmark.
In addition, the first MDG--which aims to reduce extreme poverty by 50 percent--can likewise be much more easily achieved in a country that has a lower percentage of poverty to begin with. Two countries with the same gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate over the same period of time could end up with significantly different percentage reductions in poverty, depending on the original percentage of their populations in poverty, the study said.
Africa’s GDP grew at the “eminently respectable“ rate of 5.4 percent in 2006, according to the study--a rate which, were it to be sustained over a 10-year period, would place Africa in the top fifth of all 10-year GDP growth rates in all countries from 1965 to 2005.
Yet world leaders have criticized African countries for falling far short of the 7 percent annual growth that needs to be sustained to make substantial inroads into poverty.
A growth rate of 7 percent would place African countries among the top tenth of all 10-year GDP growth rates recorded worldwide since 1965, the study said.

European automakers are preparing a massive onslaught of diesel-powered models that they say will help cut fuel bills and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 25 percent.

Overpowering diesel fumes fill the cabin of the double-cab pickup as it lines up behind hundreds of idling trucks, stuck queuing at North America’s busiest border crossing.
Ambassador Bridge, which links Canada and the US in a graceful stretch across the Detroit river, may be beautiful. But it stinks. For many Americans, slow-moving queues such as this one are seen as a necessary evil.
The 18-wheeler trucks that cross the bridge transport more than a quarter of all trade between the two nations by volume, adding tens of thousands of jobs and some $10 billion to $15 billion to economic output, according to some estimates, BBC News reported.
But they also belch out tons of diesel, which has been widely blamed for a range of ailments ranging from bronchitis to asthma to lung cancer.

Reluctant Consumers
These days, most urban filling stations offer diesel in both areas yet the filling station’s layout often remains as a potent symbol of a line that many Americans are loath to cross.
In a country where the “filthy fuel“ is generally reviled, most would not even consider buying a diesel-powered family vehicle.
And yet, in spite of such extreme distrust in diesel, European automakers are preparing a massive onslaught of diesel-powered models that they say will help cut fuel bills and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 25 percent.
This year, for the first time, diesel-powered cars that meet the emissions regulations in all 50 states will arrive in the US, says Stefan Krause, BMW’s executive director in charge of sales and marketing, in an interview with BBC News.
“If you point out the environmental friendliness of these cars and if you point out that it’s more cost-effective than petrol, then high performance diesels will be accepted,“ he predicts.
Dieter Zetsche, chief executive of Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, agrees. “We are very bullish about the prospects for diesel in this country,“ he said.

Necessary Evil
Much of the science is on the side of modern diesel, which has a sulphur content limited to 15 parts per million (ppm), compared with up to 500 ppm found in the diesel of yesteryear.
Consequently, a growing number of industry observers agree with the claims made by manufacturers of diesel-powered cars: “Diesels can produce enormous improvements in the short-term,“ according to Paul Ingrassia, author of Comeback: The Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry.
The emergence of so-called “clean diesel“ has taken Europe by storm and now outsells petrol pretty much across the board.
Diesel now accounts for more than half of all new cars sold in Europe, and only a quarter of luxury car buyers in Europe choose petrol engines, though this is largely because of tax rules that favor diesel.
In the US, meanwhile, diesel has yet to rise above a single-digit market share in any segment, though there are early signs that wealthy drivers, who are more likely to choose cars made by non-US manufacturers, are keen to embrace the fuel.
Big & Powerful
In Europe, carmakers are offering a broad range of diesel-powered vehicles that have been specially designed to meet the continent’s much stricter environmental regulations.
But do not expect the same model ranges to go on sale in the United States.
All the German manufacturers aim to woo US drivers with diesel-powered muscle-cars in a carefully thought-out effort to convince Americans that a switch to diesel will not involve sacrificing performance.