Online retailer Amazon has announced another move into a traditional brick and mortar business, drive-up grocery stores.

The company announced the AmazonFresh Pickup service Tuesday, according to CNBC. The service, which is currently only available to Amazon employees, would allow Amazon Prime members to order groceries online, choose a pick up time and pick them up at that store.

The service would allow customers to select fruits, vegetables, breads, dairy and meats among other items. Pick up times can be made as soon as within 15 minutes of placing an order.

Amazon also offers a grocery delivery service to certain parts of the United States.

AmazonFresh Pickup is the latest move for the company, which is also reportedly considering furniture and home appliance showrooms, according to the New York Times.

The company is also experimenting with convenience stores without cashiers.

 
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Indonesia has the world’s fourth-largest population at almost 260 million, but only 10 percent are registered as taxpayers and only about one million actually submit a tax return. That’s a major reason for the country’s huge and growing deficit, which has stalled the present administration’s ambitious infrastructure plans.

To jump-start the recovery of assets that wealthy Indonesians sequester abroad, the country launched a tax amnesty program in the summer of 2016. It was an experiment that drew criticism from the likes of OECD, the IMF, and domestic labor unions. Still, as it enters the final days of its nine months, the program has exceeded monetary expectations, netting about $330 billion of tax revenue.

The big question, once it wraps up on March 31, is what to do with that money. Finance Minister Sri Mulyani has created a task force to address the repatriated assets, but they can only really start their work after the final numbers are released. The government must also respond to criticism that the amnesty program lets off tax evaders too easily, to the detriment of the working class.

Closing the deficit

“The revenue from this will significantly contribute to reducing the national deficit,” said Asmiati Malik, an economics researcher at the University of Birmingham. “It could do so by as much as 70 percent: from $23 billion to $8.2 billion.”

In recent weeks, regional tax offices have put on daily public campaigns to encourage participation in the amnesty program. Hestu Yoga Saksama of the Taxation Directorate General told the Jakarta Post as many as 4,000 people signed up for it every day in March that as many as 4,000 people signed up for it every day in March, suggesting it arose from a general tendency to procrastinate on personal finances.

“In our culture, people tend to wait until the very last moment,” said Yoga.

Over three million Indonesians have become new tax payers in the last year, according to the Directorate General of Taxation. This includes high profile business people like those of the Indonesian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, a business lobby, who signed up en masse earlier this year.

Since the 1990s, when there were ethnic riots and political unrest before and after the fall of long-time dictator Suharto, rich Indonesians have relocated money to tax havens like Singapore, according to Bloomberg.

“Two huge benefits of the amnesty program for taxpayers now are the low interest rate and the abolition of tax debt,” said Yustinus Prastowo of the Center for Indonesia Taxation Analysis.

If they repatriate assets, individuals will be charged between two and ten percent interest, rather than typical corporate or personal income tax rates, which can reach 30 percent. And they must commit to keeping those assets within Indonesia for at least three years.

Expanding the tax base

Indonesia has already generated more revenue from its tax amnesty experiment than analogous efforts in countries like India and Germany, but according to some experts, there remains room for expansion.

“The major issue is that the number of taxpayers who joined the amnesty program is still low, proportionally,” said Malik. “There are roughly 700,000 people who joined the program out of a total 32 million taxpayers… which is only 2.2 percent of those eligible.”

Malik called for a more progressive tax policy to increase participation in both the amnesty program and taxation in general. “It should be more progressive regarding extensification [widening the tax base], and increase the incentive for tax compliance and avoidance,” she said. “These solutions hinge on using ‘one-gate identification’ that integrates a person’s bank account, national ID, and tax ID, so that no one can avoid declaring their assets.”

That being said, the first round of the amnesty program is well-timed; by September of this year, Indonesia will join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Automatic Exchange of Information initiative to share its tax figures internationally. That means it will be able to access the details of Indonesian citizens’ offshore assets in countries like Singapore and the Cayman Islands.

Rising inequality

The OECD, however, was an early critic of Indonesia’s project of tax amnesty. Programs like this are “unlikely to deliver benefits that exceed their true costs, but carry a risk of leading to an erosion of the gross revenue collected and may negatively affect overall tax compliance,” Philip Kerfs, of OECD’s Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, told Bloomberg in August 2016.

Opponents of the program argue that tax evaders are essentially rewarded for flouting the law.

Last fall, there were large worker protests in Jakarta against tax amnesty, and most of the country’s labor unions have vocally opposed the policy.

The International Monetary Fund also expressed doubts about the program. “We were a little skeptical with the implementation of tax amnesty anywhere, but we hope we are wrong in Indonesia,” said IMF’s Luis Bereu.

On Monday, the Directorate General of Taxation announced it was devoting “special attention” to pursuing several members of a Forbes list of the richest Indonesians who have not yet registered for tax amnesty.

Prastowo suggested another reason why the funds may eventually fall short of their potential — the hardline rallies that gripped Jakarta last November and December, against the city’s Chinese Christian governor. The political disturbance, he said, may have deterred investors from bringing their money back home. It’s a remarkable parallel to the unrest that sent many wealthy Indonesians packing in the first place.
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Twitter Inc, trying to boost its sagging advertising revenue, will allow brands to buy commercials on its video streams for Periscope, signaling a major push to make money off the live-streaming platform, the company announced on Tuesday morning.

With sponsors growing more wary of exactly what kind of online videos their ads are being placed against, Twitter is allowing a select group of advertisers to purchase pre-roll videos, meaning those that run prior to the publishers’ content, on Periscope streams.

Twitter acquired Periscope in 2015.

Google’s YouTube, long the dominant force for online video ad dollars, has seen an exodus from brands upset to find their ads running alongside anti-Semitic and other videos that shocked customers. Companies that left included Verizon Communications Inc, AT&T Inc and Johnson & Johnson.

YouTube’s selling process automatically places ads next to videos that meet the criteria for the audience advertisers want to reach, but the Alphabet unit has had difficulty policing the vast array of videos that are uploaded.

Twitter is only offering up a select group of publishers for brands to buy ads against, which will let advertisers know exactly where their ads are showing up. “This is the solution to that problem,” Matthew Derella, Twitter’s vice president of global revenue and operations, told Reuters. “We believe the advertiser should have control.”

The video ads will only be seen when viewed within Twitter’s platform. Twitter allowed for Periscope streams to be integrated within Twitter last year. The advertisers will be able to purchase ads on Periscope videos through Twitter’s Amplify program.

Until now, Twitter has monetized Periscope by relying on brands to purchase Promoted Tweets, which are placed in user feeds, even for those who do not follow the company on Twitter. The goal is to draw more attention whenever the company is live-streaming something on Periscope.

Twitter is looking to turn around its sagging fortunes. Its stock has slumped 8 percent so far this year as investors have worried about slowed user and advertising revenue growth, along with mounting competition from Facebook Inc’s Instagram, and Snap Inc’s Snapchat.

In the fourth quarter of 2016, Twitter posted the slowest revenue growth since it went public four years earlier, and revenue from advertising fell from a year earlier. The company warned that advertising revenue growth would continue to lag user growth during 2017. The company is also considering a paid subscription offering.

 
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Turkish and Gulf airlines are touting free WiFi and better in-flight connectivity for smartphones as they scramble to mitigate the impact of a ban on laptops in plane cabins bound for the United States.

The restrictions could deal a blow to fast-growing Gulf airlines, which depend on business-class flyers stopping over in Dubai or Doha for far-flung destinations, and to Turkish Airlines with its high volume of transit passengers.

A Turkish Airlines official said it was working on rolling out a system to allow passengers to use 3G data roaming on mobile phones to connect to the internet in-flight, and planned to make WiFi freely available on some aircraft from next month.

“We’ve sped up infrastructure work after the latest developments. … If the work is complete, we’re planning on switching to free WiFi services in our Boeing 777 and Airbus 330 aircraft in April,” the official told Reuters.

Emirates said Thursday it was introducing a “laptop and tablet handling service” for U.S.-bound flights which would allow passengers to use their devices until just before they board. The devices would be “carefully packed into boxes” and returned on arrival in the United States, it said.

Emirates passengers can access limited free WiFi or pay $1 for 500 MB.

Fellow Gulf carrier Etihad encouraged passengers to pack their electronics in check-in luggage but said it would also allow devices to be handed over at boarding, a spokesman said. Turkish said it had introduced a similar measure.

Qatar Airways did not respond to questions on how it planned to mitigate the impact of the new security measures, but in a Facebook posting this week it said its in-flight entertainment was “the only entertainment you’ll need on board.”

Royal Jordanian also took a tongue-in-cheek approach, listing on Twitter “12 things to do on a 12-hour flight with no laptop or tablet,” including reading, meditating, saying hello to your neighbor, or “reclaiming territory on your armrest.”
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In New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell for the eight consecutive day on Monday.  Investors may have been discouraged by the failure of U.S. President Donald Trump to pass big changes to the health care insurance system that he promised during the campaign.

U.S. stock indexes were down sharply in morning trading, but by Monday’s close, the S&P 500 was off just one-tenth of a percent, with the Dow down two-tenths.  The NASDAQ posted a slight gain.

U.S. and other stocks had been mostly rising since the November election on business hopes that promised cuts in taxes and regulation and a boost in spending on public works would stimulate the economy and boost profits.

Now investors are worried that the inability of the Republican president to get support from his Republican-controlled Congress means he will struggle to deliver promised changes on other complex and controversial efforts.

Later this week, government officials will report new data on growth of the U.S. economy and the health of the job market.
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Transnational crime, or crimes committed across international borders, is growing at a faster pace than many realize, partly because the international community is not paying a lot of attention to it. That’s the conclusion from Global Financial Integrity or GFI, a non-profit Washington think tank that tracks illicit financial flows across borders.

The group’s latest findings estimate that transnational crime is worth between $1.6 to $2.2 trillion per year. GFI says the lion’s share of illicitly generated funds around the globe comes from counterfeiting, worth between $923 billion to $1.13 trillion per year, followed by drug trafficking which generates between $426 to $652 billion in illegal funds annually.

“Transnational crime is a business, and business is very good,” said Channing May, author of GFI’s “Transnational Crime and the Developing World.”  Less understood, said May, are the lasting and negative consequences for governments and the economies of developing countries.  

“Very rarely do the revenues from transnational crime have any long-term benefit to citizens, communities or economies of developing countries. Instead, the crimes undermine local and national economies, destroy the environment and jeopardize the health and well-being of the public,” said May.

Rounding out the top 10

Of the top 10 illegal revenue generators around the globe, human trafficking is ranked in fourth place, generating roughly $150 billion per year, followed by illegal mining, worth upwards of $48 billion. In eighth place, crude oil theft is valued between $5 to $12 billion, and in 10th place, the trafficking of human organs may be worth as much as $1.7 billion per year.

The report says shutting down the global shadow financial system that facilitates the movement and transfer of illicitly generated funds is technically not a difficult undertaking, but rather a matter of political will.

Complete report due March 29

GFI program manager Christine Clough said recommendations include greater financial transparency and regulations requiring all corporations to declare the nature and the ultimate beneficiaries of doing business within countries.

“Networks involved in these illicit markets are akin to major global corporations: they need access to finance and banking to be profitable to continue operating,” said Clough.

The complete GFI report will be released March 29 in Washington and is based on a compilation of statistics from various government and non-governmental bodies and law enforcement sources.
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Just months ahead of local elections, the Cambodian government has ordered the microfinance industry to cap the interest rate on new loans at 18 percent a year. While borrowers will applaud that at least in the short term the decision has rocked the industry, which fears some firms will go bankrupt. The end result could be fewer small loans for villagers, who will be driven into the hands of predatory lenders. For VOA, Robert Carmichael has the story from Phnom Penh.
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A joint committee of ministers from OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers has agreed to review whether a global pact to limit supplies should be extended by six months, it said in a statement on Sunday.

An earlier draft of the statement said the committee “reports high level of conformity and recommends six-month extension.”

But the final statement said only that the committee had requested a technical group and the OPEC Secretariat “review the oil market conditions and revert … in April, 2017 regarding the extension of the voluntary production adjustments.”

It was not immediately clear why the wording had been changed, although a senior industry source said the committee lacked the legal mandate to recommend an extension.

OPEC and rival oil-producing countries were meeting in Kuwait to review progress with their global pact to cut supplies.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and 11 other leading oil producers including Russia agreed in December to cut their combined output by almost 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) in the first half of the year.

“Any country has the freedom to say whether they do or they don’t support [an extension]. Unless we have conformity with everybody, we cannot go ahead with the extension of the deal,” Kuwaiti Oil Minister Essam al-Marzouq said, adding that he hoped a decision would come by the end of April.

The oil ministerial committee “expressed its satisfaction with the progress made towards full conformity with the voluntary production adjustments and encouraged all participating countries to press on towards 100 percent conformity,” the statement said.

The December accord, aimed at supporting the oil market, has lifted crude to more than $50 a barrel. But the price gain has encouraged U.S. shale oil producers, which are not part of the pact, to boost output.

The committee said it took note that certain factors, such as low seasonal demand, refinery maintenance and rising non-OPEC supply had led to an increase in crude oil stocks. It also observed the liquidation of positions by financial players.

“However, the end of the refinery maintenance season and noticeable slowdown in U.S. stock build as well as the reduction in floating storage will support the positive efforts undertaken to achieve stability in the market,” it said.

It asked the OPEC Secretariat to review oil market conditions and come back with recommendations in April regarding an extension of the agreement.

“This reaffirms the commitment of OPEC and participating non-OPEC countries to continue to cooperate,” the statement said.

Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said it was too early to say whether there would be an extension, although the agreement was working well and all countries were committed to 100 percent compliance.

‘Encouraging elements’

Before the meeting, Iraqi Oil Minister Jabar Ali al-Luaibi told reporters there were some encouraging elements that suggested the oil market was improving, and that if all OPEC members agreed measures to help price stability, Iraq would support such steps.

“Any decisions taken unanimously by members of OPEC … Iraq will be part of the decision and will not be deviating from this,” Luaibi said.

Iraq’s oil production is running at 4.312 million bpd this month, Luaibi said, adding that his country had cut its oil exports by 187,000 bpd so far and would reach 210,000 bpd in a few days.

Compliance with the supply-cut deal was 94 percent in February among OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers combined, Russia’s Novak said.

Russia is committed to cuts of 300,000 bpd by the end of April, Novak said.

Novak said he expects global oil stockpiles to decrease in the second quarter of this year.

“The dynamics are positive here, I believe,” Novak said, adding that inventories in the United States and other industrialized countries had risen by less than in the past.

Kuwait’s oil minister said the market may return to balance by the third quarter of this year if producers comply fully with their production targets.

“More has to be done. We need to see conformity across the board. We assured ourselves and the world that we would reach our adjustment to 100 percent conformity,” Marzouq said.
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