Sweden: Volvo axes more than 4,000 jobs as corona crisis hits demand

 Swedish truckmaker Volvo said the coronavirus pandemic had forced it tocut 4,100 white collar jobs worldwide, including around 1,250 in Sweden.

Read more at:
Volvo axes more than 4,000 jobs as corona crisis hits demand - The Local

Corona Virus hits Northern Europe: Norway announces first case of coronavirus as Sweden treats citizen returning from Italy

Norwegian health authorities on Wednesday announced the first case of coronavirus in the Nordic nation in someone who returned from China last week, but said the patient was not "in danger".

In Sweden a man in his 30s is being treated in hospital for the new coronavirus after visiting Italy, Swedish health authorities confirm.

The patient fell ill after returning from Italy.

Read more at:
https://www.thelocal.no/20200226/breaking-norway-announces-first-case-of-coronavirus and
https://www.thelocal.se/20200226/new-coronavirus-case-confirmed-in-gothenburg-sweden

Sweden: Why electricity prices are set for record lows throughout 2020 in Sweden

More wind power and windy weather, along with a lot of water in reservoirs, are two of the factors behind the forecasts.

On the Nordpool power exchange, a kilowatt-hour currently costs around 15 öre, which is extremely low for mid-winter.

The so-called futures, or prices for the second and third quarter, are
currently set at around ten öre, and likely to rise to around 24 öre in
the fourth quarter of 2020.

Read more at: Why electricity prices are set for record lows throughout 2020 in Sweden - The Local

Sweden - Cash-Free: Ikea to test cash-free store in Sweden

Swedish furniture giant Ikea is going to use its Gävle location to test out whether it can go completely cash-free nationwide.

Ikea said that customers in Gävle, an eastern city best known for its giant straw Christmas goat, were strongly in favour of abandoning cash.

“In our surveys, the vast majority of customers have said that cash payments are no longer important.

Today we use a fair amount of resources on handling cash but we’d prefer to use them on something else,” Patric Burstein, the head of customer relations at the Gävle store, told Dagens Nyheter.

Ikea said that its cashless test would begin in Gävle on October 1st. If all goes well, the company plans to eliminate cash payments in all of its Swedish locations.

Department store Åhléns is also testing the idea of going cashless, with three of its locations currently not accepting cash payments.

Swedes use their debit cards three times as frequently as most Europeans and with the popularity of smartphone payment apps like Swish, it has been predicted that Sweden will be completely cash-free by 2030

Read more: Ikea to test cash-free store in Sweden - The Local

Weapons Industry: Global arms sales in 2015 reached €348 billion with US share €225.47 or 80% of total reports SIPRI

Global weapons industry sales reached  €348 billion in 2015

Arms sales went on a downward slide last year, falling by 0.6 percent compared to 2014, according to the latest analysis on the global arms industry by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

The trade had been experiencing a downward trend since 2011, but the reduction in arms sales last year showed that the pace of decline had slowed.

Despite the decrease, arms sales for the world's top 100 companies in 2015 reached $370.7 billion (348 billion euros), the think tank said in its study, indicating that the sinking numbers were no sign that the world was getting more peaceful.

"It [arms sales] has decreased, but it is still over a third higher than it used to be in the early 2000s," Aude Fleurant, director of the SIPRI arms and military expenditure program, told DW. "It is slowing down, possibly indicating a reversal of the trend since 2010. So it is difficult to say at this stage …

There are contradictory trends all over the world and it is difficult to identify a clear trend so far," she added.

US firms remain on top of the arms sales industry.

Companies based in the US dominated the arms business, with total sales amounting to $209.7 billion (€225.47 Billion) , or more than 80 percent of the total arms business in the world. Lockheed Martin maintained its position as the largest arms producer on the planet.

EU-Digest

Global Corporate Takeover: 10 biggest corporations make more money than most countries in the world combined

 69 of top 100 economic entities are corporations not countries

Walmart, Apple, Shell richer than Russia, Belgium, Sweden, and the Netherlands

British government has been told: stop supporting your corporations, support your people

Corporations have increased their wealth vis-à-vis countries according to new figures released by Global Justice Now.

The campaign group found that 69 of the world’s top economic entities are corporations rather than countries in 2015*. They also discovered that the world’s top 10 corporations – a list that includes Walmart, Shell and Apple – have a combined revenue of more than the 180 ‘poorest’ countries combined in the list which include Ireland, Indonesia, Israel, Colombia, Greece, South Africa, Iraq and Vietnam.  

The figures are worse than last year, when 63 of the top economic entities were corporations. When looking at the top 200 economic entities, the figures are even more extreme, with 153 being corporations.

Global Justice Now released the figures in order to increase pressure on the British government ahead of a UN working group, led by Ecuador, established to draw up a binding treaty to ensure transnational corporations abide by the full range of human rights responsibilities. Campaigners are calling for the treaty to be legally enforceable at a national and global level. Britain doesn’t support the process, and has repeatedly vetoed and opposed such proposal in the past.  

Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said:

“The vast wealth and power of corporations is at the heart of so many of the world’s problems – like inequality and climate change. The drive for short-term profits today seems to trump basic human rights for millions of people on the planet. These figures show the problem is getting worse.

“The UK government has facilitated this rise in corporate power – through tax structures, trade deals and even aid programmes that help big business. Their wholehearted support for the US-EU trade deal TTIP, is just the latest example of government help to big business. Disgracefully it also routinely opposes the call of developing countries to hold corporations to account for their human rights impacts at the UN. That’s why today we’re joining campaigns from across the world to tell the British government to stop blocking this international demand for justice.”

Read more: 10 biggest corporations make more money than most countries in the world combined | Global Justice Now

Open and Shut: Sweden’s Identity Crisis

Sweden, the biggest country at the heart of rich and peaceful Scandinavia, is in many ways in the eye of the current migration storm tearing through Europe. Although it is admitting fewer refugees than Germany in terms of sheer numbers, Sweden is—and has been for several years—the European Union’s (EU) biggest per capita recipient of refugees by quite a wide margin. In 2014, Sweden, a country with just 9 million inhabitants, received more than 80,000 asylum applications. This year, that number is set to grow substantially.

From one angle, no other country seems better equipped to handle this challenge. Having weathered fairly well both the recent economic crisis and a deeper transition to a globalized, European Union-infused economy,

Sweden remains at, or close to, the top of global tables of wealth and well-being. It might no longer be the quasi-socialist paradise that many people looked to—and flocked to—in the 1970s, but it is one of the few European countries that still seems able to combine relatively solid growth, a strong welfare state and a genuine openness, both in economic terms and in immigration policy. Sweden is also already an “immigrant society”: At 16 percent, the proportion of its foreign-born population is higher than that of not only Germany and Great Britain, but also the U.S.

 In other words, Sweden is a country that should easily be able to bear its share of the burden in the biggest global refugee crisis since World War II.

Read moreOpen and Shut: Sweden’s Identity Crisis