India
Source: infobrics.org

Over 1.5-2 lakh (1 lakh = 100 000. – InfoBRICS) doses of Russian Covid-19 vaccine Sputnik V will be provided to India in the starting of May, DB Venkatesh Varma, Ambassador of India to Russia said. He added that the vaccine numbers will be subsequently increased over the next few months.

1.5-2 Lakh vaccine will be provided to India in. It will be increased by middle or later part of May. It will be increased to 5 million in June and so forward," Venkatesh Varma said.

Earlier, Verma has said the production of the vaccine will start in India in May and it is likely to go upto 50 million doses a month. He had said that the first shipment will take place by the end of April and the production will be launched in May and it will slowly increase.

Verma also added that there are no plans to restrict travel between India and Russia in view of Covid.

In September 2020, Dr Dr Reddy's Laboratories and RDIF entered into a partnership to conduct clinical trials of SputnikV, developed by the Gamaleya National Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology and the rights for distribution of the first 100 million doses in India.

Later, it was enhanced to 125 million. "We are targeting to have the first batches imported by Q1, and are trying our best to have them by end-May," A Dr Reddy's spokesperson said.

Russia's Sputnik V, the world's first vaccine registered against the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), has been recommended for emergency use by experts in India, which is seeing a worrying spike in cases linked to the viral infection.

India
Source: www.gzeromedia.com

While residents of wealthy countries are getting ready for hot vaxxed summer — COVID is still ravaging many low- and middle-income countries. The horrifying scenes coming out of India in recent weeks have gripped the world, causing governments and civil society to quickly mobilize and pledge support.

But on the other side of the globe, Brazil is also being pummeled by the pandemic — and has been for a year now. Yet thus far, the outpouring of aid and (solidarity) hasn't been as large.

What explains the global alarm at India's situation, and seeming passivity towards Brazil's plight? What are the politics of compassion?

Scope of the crises. Both India and Brazil are experiencing catastrophic outbreaks of disease. These countries have the two highest death rates in the world, recording 2,367 deaths (Brazil) and 3,571 (India) respectively on average over the past 7-days. (However, data coming out of India is vastly undercounted.)

Both are seeing a steady stream of new daily cases and deaths: Brazil and India recorded 28 new cases per 100,000 on average over the past week. But there's one big difference: while India's deterioration has been recent and swift, Brazil's crisis has been relentless over the past 12 months.

Global (in)action: While both Brazil and India are spiralling, the international response to India and Brazil has been vastly different.

For India, the Biden administration mobilized to deliver $100 million in emergency aid in mere days, and directed vaccine supplies to Indian drug manufacturers.

And while critics have pointed out that US aid to India is still too stingy, compare that to to Washington's tight-fisted approach to Brazil: despite repeated appeals for help from Brazilian officials, Washington has doled out just $19.7 million in pandemic-related aid over the past year, including less than $2 million for hard-hit Amazonian communities as they were literally fighting for breath. Similarly, Brussels has offered help to India, while remaining apathetic towards Brazil. (Germany recently sent 80 ventilators to the Amazonian city of Manaus.)

Why?

Politics is personal. One contributing factor is that Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro has not cultivated much goodwill from the international community over the past few years. The brash populist has denied the severity of COVID, scuttled states' efforts to implement lockdowns, and sowed doubt about vaccines' efficacy. And his history of insulting world leaders hasn't helped: He amplified a social media post describing French President Emmanuel Macron's wife as "ugly," and questioned President Biden's electoral victory. Meanwhile, his own government has managed to insult Beijing (mocking Chinese-made vaccines and tweeting racist content about the origins of the pandemic) despite the fact that Brazil depends heavily on China — its largest trade partner — for vaccine supplies.

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, by contrast, has cut a different figure. Although he is a divisive leader who has made a series of recent blunders in handling the pandemic, he has not diminished the seriousness of COVID-19, and has maintained warm relations with governments whose help his country desperately needs. That approach appears to be working better than Bolsonaro's.

The power of the diaspora. At 18 million, India has the world's largest diaspora, 17 percent of whom live in the United States. As India's crisis spiraled, student groups and non-governmental organizations around the world quickly stepped in to raise funds. Indiaspora, a DC-based non-profit, announced that it had raised $1 million in just 48 hours. Meanwhile, GoFund said that 60,000 donors from 106 countries had contributed to India-related fundraisers since April 17.

While Brazil also has a sizable diaspora population, 450,000 of whom live in the US, its size pales next to India's. And there has been almost nothing comparable in terms of online fundraising.

Acute vs chronic disease. Since COVID exploded in December 2019, hotspots have come and gone. But Brazil's crisis has been more or less constant for a year now. COVID cases — and deaths — have continued to plague populous states like São Paulo and Minas Gerais. Many people around the world seem to have gotten used to things being very bad in Brazil.

India, on the other hand, seemed to have things under control as recently as March. The crisis appeared to come out of nowhere just as economies in Europe, North America and elsewhere were preparing to reopen. This created a sense of global panic and served as a call to action because no one is going back to normal until we all are.

At the moment, neither Brazil nor India is close to that.

China
Source: www.chinadaily.com.cn

Decarbonization efforts in China will not stoke inflation, says NDB official

Growing impetus for decarbonizing efforts in China and the rest of the world will spawn new technologies that will change the ways of production, instead of just cutting carbon-intensive production and stoking inflation, a senior executive of a leading global financial institution said.

" (Decarbonization) doesn't mean that we are going to stop producing certain things. It will be producing in different ways," Leslie Maasdorp, vice-president of the Shanghai-based New Development Bank, told China Daily. The NDB is a multilateral development bank established by the BRICS economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Maasdorp's words came amid concerns among some experts that decarbonization could lead to losses in steel supplies and other carbon-heavy industries and thus exert inflationary pressure.

Amid decarbonization efforts, new technologies are expected to emerge and form new business models and production processes that are less carbon-intensive, he said.

"One should not be concerned about the potential loss of production in steel and some carbon-intensive industries because of decarbonization. I believe in technology. Over hundreds of years, technology is the lever that provides the window into the future," he said.

The world's course toward a less carbon-intensive economy has been on a fast track after the US administration announced the target of an about 50 percent reduction from 2005 levels in net greenhouse gas pollution by 2030, while China is striving to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.

The NDB is focused to help member economies, including China, toward carbon neutrality and facilitate related revolutions in business models, Maasdorp said, though the imperative priority now remains helping the economies out of the public health crisis and economic impact caused by COVID-19.

In this regard, the bank has allocated five member countries all of the $10 billion worth of emergency assistance facility that it set up last year, and has recently provided new loans to South Africa and Brazil, he said.

The NDB vice-president made the remarks on Sunday on the sidelines of the establishment ceremony of Xiamen Torch University, located in Xiamen, Fujian province. The university is aimed at promoting innovation and industrial upgrade by closely combining education and research with actual needs of companies located in the Xiamen Torch Development Zone for High Technology Industries.

The NDB is ready to boost skill development to strengthen industrial capacity in BRICS countries, including facilitating the Torch development zone's talent enhancement initiatives like setting up Xiamen Torch University, Maasdorp said.

He said the university has the potential to not only lift the industrial capability of Xiamen, but spur economic development in other parts of China and even other BRICS economies. Its experience in nurturing talent and promoting innovation could provide strategies that can be replicated elsewhere, and training materials used here can be shared with other regions in a virtual format.

China's economic prospects have seen a "massive turnaround" from the COVID-19 dip, but macro policy support is still necessary for sustaining the rebound, Maasdorp said.

"There are still too many uncertainties in the immediate future." The worsening pandemic situation in India, for instance, may reverberate across neighboring economies, while the uneven global economic recovery might cloud the external demand of China, he said.

China's GDP posted the fastest expansion on record of 18.3 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of the year, yet the economy has not fully normalized, with the services sector, manufacturing investment and consumption lagging behind, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

To promote a shared, sustainable economic recovery, Maasdorp said that China and other BRICS economies should strengthen collaboration in vaccination, or share ideas, technologies and resources to ensure fast vaccination among the population, and deepen economic partnership in investment and trade.

China's economic rebound has contributed to the global economy "in a major way" given its sheer size, but will contribute significantly more once cross-border people movement further normalizes amid a more stabilized pandemic situation, he said.

Brazil
Source: infobrics.org

The New Development Bank (NDB) has accelerated the approval of loans for Brazil after having established a physical presence in the country.

The BRICS countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – created NDB in 2014 and it became fully operational in 2016.

The Brazilian senate authorized the bank to open an office in the country in July 2020, paving the way for increased financing of local projects.

Last year, NDB loans to the BRICS nations totaled US$10.2bn and Brazil received the largest share with US$3.5bn for six projects, according to Brazilian infrastructure association ABDIB.

The projects included US$2bn to support federal government programs to combat the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as emergency aid and financing for micro and small enterprises, Claudia Prates, head of NDB's Americas operations, told an event hosted by ABDIB.

For this year, the bank expects to approve loans for Brazil worth US$1.2bn.

Since its creation, NDB has approved US$5.1bn in loans for Brazil, representing nearly 18% of all approved loans, ahead of Russia (16.3%) but trailing India (24.3%), China (22.6%) and South Africa (18.8%).

South Africa
Source: www.engineeringnews.co.za

Efforts to accelerate the post-Covid-19 recovery in South Africa must be done sustainability and in an inclusive manner, speakers said during the Financial Services Working Group of the South African chapter of the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (Brics) Business Council's webinar.

Development finance institution (DFI) the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) of South Africa CEO TP Nchocho said as was the case with most DFIs and banks with the advent of the pandemic, it did not know what the future would hold and how things would unfold, and there was a natural adjustment to pull back and be extra cautious.

This proved prudent, as there were instances of devaluations in asset values, lost capital and businesses going bankrupt.

However, he noted that the IDC had seen significant recovery in its balance sheet, with assets recovered; funding partners globally opening lines of funding to it again; and its matured mainly listed assets also recovering. Therefore, he said, the organisation's funding capacity was much improved and was strong.

In deploying funding and aiming to engender recovery, Nchocho said the IDC, in line with its mandate, was prioritising the manufacturing and industrial sectors, as well as the localisation of manufacturing. The organisation is also investing a lot of money in renewables and a robust pipeline of energy efficiency projects for distributed generation. The IDC was looking to further expand in this area.

Nchocho said the country had somewhat lost its momentum in terms of infrastructure rollout; however, he acclaimed that some impetus was returning, with the IDC having positive engagements with major State-owned entities with a focus on driving partnerships for development to get infrastructure implementation going.

He also noted a need to expand access infrastructure to less developed areas.

Meanwhile, nonprofit organisation Southern African Trust CEO Masego Madzwamuse commented that, when aiming for recovery, it must come from the perspective of who is driving it, who is benefiting and what kind of discussion was shaping priorities.

She noted that when countries reopened after lockdowns, the informal sector was largely forgotten, with provisions to resume economic activity skewed towards assisting big business.

She pointed out that in South Africa and the rest of the African continent, the structure of the economy was largely informal, with the most economic activity driven by women.

She noted that there were deficits in this informal structure in terms of incentives being put in place, infrastructure and policy support, which needed to be addressed.

Africa-based Fintech company Mukuru Group CEO Andy Jury highlighted the importance of digital financial inclusion, which the company had aimed to do by trying to bridge the cash to digital divide. He emphasised that digitalisation was not a binary switch, but rather, a series of links in the value chain.

The company's approach has been to find out what its customers' pain and friction points were in their informal processes, and then walk alongside them with a solution that creates progress, rather than assuming what they may needed and advertising a solution.

With a large number of transaction happening in the informal sector, and customers also needing to send money across borders, it uses mobile and Web-based technologies to enable this efficiently and cost effectively.

Engineering News

Russia
Source: www.mid.ru

Question: What impact have the sanctions had on the state of relations between Russia and the West?

Maria Zakharova: Unfortunately, the growing use of politically motivated, unilateral restrictive measures by a number of Western countries, primarily the United States, has become a reality of our time. We increasingly view the sanctions against Russia as a "gesture of despair" and a manifestation of the local elites' inability to accept the new reality, abandon the stereotypes of their bloc-based thinking, and recognise Russia's right to independently determine its path of development and build relationships with its partners. Apparently, they find it difficult to handle the obvious successes of the Russian economy, which is growing more competitive, internationally, and the greater presence of high-quality Russian goods and services in world markets.

The vicious practice of imposing unilateral political and economic restrictions, especially the extraterritorial application of such measures, is an infringement on the sovereignty of states and interference in their internal affairs aimed at keeping, at any cost, their dominant position in the global economy and international politics, which they are gradually losing. Diplomacy is being replaced by sanctions; sanctions help mask trade protectionism and attempts to divert attention from internal problems as well.

Indicatively enough, the West has ignored the calls of the UN Secretary-General and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to suspend unilateral, illegitimate sanctions on the supply of medicines, food and equipment necessary to fight the coronavirus during the pandemic. We also have not seen any interest from our partners in Russian President Vladimir Putin's initiative proposed during the G20 summit to create green corridors in international trade, free from sanctions or other artificial barriers.

The restrictions introduced against our country undoubtedly have had a negative impact on our relations with the collective West. They are undermining mutual trust, and darkening the prospects for normalising relations. Although we do not at all support pushing the sanctions spiral upward, we nevertheless accept the challenge and respond promptly and in a targeted manner. Given the obvious fact that anti-Russia sanctions are a double-edged weapon that inflicts no less damage on the one wielding it, we do hope that common sense will prevail, and our partners will return to building ties with us, relying on the principles of justice and equality and relinquishing the "right of the strongest" and the invasion of sovereign affairs of other states. We have repeatedly made it clear that we did not start this sanctions war, but we are ready, at any point, to do our part in order to end this pointless confrontation, in which there will not be and cannot be any winners.

Question: How strong is the impact of the Western actions on the Russian economy?

Maria Zakharova: The escalation of reciprocal sanctions pressure is having an all-around negative influence both on the Russian and Western economies. Assessments of the reciprocal damage vary due to their objective nature but are still running into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Under the circumstances, we continue responding to restrictions in a balanced, appropriate manner, being guided by the interests of national economic development and domestic economic operators. In these actions, we proceed from the principle of "doing no harm to ourselves." In part, we retain our special reciprocal economic measures, that is, restrictions on the import of certain products from the countries that have introduced anti-Russia sanctions. We are consolidating our national financial system and searching for new international partners, including regional ones. We are also taking other measures aimed to diversify our foreign economic ties. We are working on economic and legal mechanisms to reduce the negative impact of restrictions on the development of bilateral trade and investment cooperation. We have drafted legislation providing for measures to counter new potential unilateral steps by the United States and other countries. We have largely managed to adapt to the external challenges and turn the situation in our favour, as well as launch programmes for import substitution and the development of advanced, competitive domestic industries.

Question: What steps is Russia taking to reduce its dependence on Western financial systems?

Maria Zakharova: The discussion on the need to reduce dependence on the dollar as the world's leading currency has been going on for at least a decade. The previous upheavals in the US financial market and the subsequent global financial and economic crisis exacerbated the vulnerability of the global economy to the dollar domination and called into doubt the sustainability of the world currency system based on the supremacy of one national monetary unit. Washington's current sanctions "voluntarism" is making even more dubious the reliability of dollar transactions. In these conditions, the task of consolidating the independence and sustainability of the financial system to external threats is increasingly becoming a priority for any state.

Question: Is Russia always destined to be dependent on the US dollar?

Maria Zakharova: In order to reduce excessive dependence on foreign means of payment, states and financial market participants have to adapt to new realities, including by finding and developing alternative settlement mechanisms. From this perspective, the gradual departure from the US-centric configuration of the world monetary system is an objective response to a combination of factors. Consistent steps in this direction in coordination with our trading partners would help strengthen the national currencies, as well as minimise the potential economic damage from new restrictive measures Western countries might introduce. This work will undoubtedly require significant effort to reformat the established models of cooperation, to create mechanisms for the support and functioning of new systems of mutual settlements and pricing in the market. Russia has recently signed agreements to expand the use of national currencies in mutual settlements with China and Turkey. There are similar agreements within BRICS. Positive trends are observed in the EAEU, with a growing share of national currencies in mutual payments, as well as in trade and economic cooperation between Russia and the countries of the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America.

Russia's possible disconnection from SWIFT is so far considered a hypothetical scenario. Nevertheless, interdepartmental work is underway to minimise the risks and economic damage to our country from restricted access to the usual international financial instruments and payment mechanisms. The Central Bank's Financial Messaging System is one example of alternative instruments. Options are also being discussed for adding interface with its foreign counterparts, such as the European SEPA, the Iranian SEPAM and the Chinese CUP and CIPS.

Cooperation is growing between the Russian MIR payment system and its foreign counterparts, in particular, the Chinese UnionPay, the Japanese JCB and the international Maestro card. Such co-branded cards are accepted both in Russia and abroad. In particular, various operations with them are already possible in Armenia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkey. At the same time, it is a long and laborious process. And it is too early to talk about any specific dates for putting together a comprehensive national toolkit for payment transactions or for its promotion to international markets.

At the same time, Russia is vigorously exploring the opportunities provided by modern digital technologies and the potential of their use to increase the sustainability, stability and independence of the national financial system and means of payment, with a clear understanding that digital money can become the foundation of an updated international financial system and cross-border transactions in the future.

Question: Can Russia ever truly insulate its economy from a hostile foreign policy?

Maria Zakharova: Only a small group of countries – to their own detriment – are pursuing a hostile policy towards Russia. In response, Russia will continue to use external challenges as additional incentives to increase the stability of its economy, mobilise the creativity of national business, modernise production, and diversify economic ties.

We will not shut out the outside world, which is something the initiators of the sanctions are persistently pushing us to do. On the contrary, we are always open for dialogue on all problems or concerns, and are ready for equal and mutually beneficial cooperation with all countries, but only on the basis of the principles of equality and mutual consideration of interests. This is how we actually see stable international relations.

For our part, we strongly support a broad international discussion of ways to counteract the illegitimate unilateral measures. We are confident that a systematic dialogue should help reduce the business community's concerns regarding the uncertainty and instability in global affairs, which are provoked by the West's one-sided and inconsistent policy. Even today, we can see that the initiators of the sanctions are starting to realise, albeit slowly, that any unilateral steps cause unacceptable damage to those taking them, and are pointless and counterproductive.

India
Source: www.business-standard.com

Competition agencies worldwide are concerned by the growing concentration of capital and other resources, including data and technologies, into the hands of an ever smaller number of players.

For the BRICS countries, the problems of growing inequality and stagnating economic development are more acute than for the mature economies. The key mission of the BRICS Competition Centre will be to promote a development agenda and to reinforce the role of antitrust regulation in overcoming imbalances in the global economy.

The establishment of the BRICS Competition Centre is aimed at providing a platform for close cooperation between BRICS competition authorities and leading academics in the field, as well as bringing together policy makers across all the BRICS countries to set the agenda for future enforcement action.

Its focus will be on gathering and analysing information from antimonopoly agencies, identifying best practices and, most importantly, drawing up recommendations and working out approaches to competition policy reflecting the development interests of the BRICS economies.

"The creation of a centre like this to address conceptual issues is long overdue. Many key competition law doctrines and theories are drawn up beyond the BRICS countries and do not fully take account of their interests and characteristics. These are, above all, issues around economic equality, protection of the public interest, and access to modern technologies. There is a clear demand in the world today for justice, for change in the global economic architecture, and this demand cannot be ignored. Antitrust laws could become an effective tool for meeting this demand if it is actively applied in a coordinated way by our countries, which represent almost half of the world's population and economic activity," said Alexey Ivanov, Director of the BRICS Competition Centre.

The creation of the new Centre is particularly relevant given the growing competitive struggle for domination in the new digital economy. One of the Centre's key research topics is new approaches to antitrust regulation of the digital economy. Other research projects include competition issues in pharmaceutical markets and a study on joint efforts by antimonopoly bodies to combat transnational cartels.

The market of one country, even as large as China, is not a sufficient argument for regulating the actions of the global digital monopoly. Competition law is now in some way a unique mechanism for economies in terms of its regulatory impact on global processes unfolding in the digital economy.

It is in an intermediate position, not reaching a well-unified set of rules, as is the case in the field of global regulation of intellectual property, but it clearly has a greater regulatory potential than the various forms of national regulation that are at the disposal of administrative law. Protection of competition is already more than a matter of national legal order, but not yet a matter of full-fledged international regulation. In this intermediate position, competition law has both strengths and weaknesses.

For example, the absence of a single global regime allows countries to experiment more, both at the national level and at the level of regional associations. At the same time, due to the reasons mentioned above, competition law is very susceptible to international cooperation, which means that it is much more likely to agree and synchronize anti-monopoly policy measures than in other more nationally oriented areas of regulation. One of the most promising formats of cooperation in the antitrust area is cooperation between the BRICS countries and other developing jurisdictions.

"Among the most promising areas for creating effective mechanisms of checks and balances for the growing market power of global digital platforms are the emerging formats of antimonopoly cooperation within the framework of regional associations of developing countries. Cooperation between the BRICS countries in the antitrust sphere can also become a serious factor for the formation of an international regime for competition, which is currently absent. Agreed requirements for digital monopolies on the part of not one country, but entire regions, could make it possible to change the situation for the better," Ivanov added.

The Centre's research work is a continuation of earlier Russian studies in the field of antitrust measures. Significant practical results of international scope have been previously achieved in the sphere of competition in the agricultural sector and food markets.

Back in 2015-17, with support from the Higher School of Economics, a working group of the antimonopoly agencies of the BRICS countries conducted a comprehensive analysis of global food markets and presented a paper which underpinned a change in the way competition is protected in this sphere.

One of the outcomes of that change was a decision by the Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russian Federation on the high-profile merger between Bayer and Monsanto, which was greatly facilitated by joint work with antitrust colleagues in the other BRICS countries.

China
Source: www.chinadaily.com.cn

Abstract: Since the launch of cooperation mechanism in BRICS countries, the member countries have focused on relaxing restrictions on market access and removing competition barriers for foreign investment in distribution supply chain services, market connection and support services, improved the transparency of regulation and control and established and strengthened cooperation mechanism among them. These measures have highly raised the opening-up level of service industry to the outside world, swiftly increased service trade volume, gained a bigger say in the world, refined the structure of service industry, sharpened the competitive edge in some sectors of service industry, consolidified the development foundation of the service industry and made a greater contribution to aggregate GDP of various countries. China needs to refer to the experience of relevant BRICS countries in light of the development characteristics of service industry at home, firmly push ahead with the openness of China's service industry to a higher level, flesh out the laws and regulations conducive to the open-oriented development of service industry, formulate targeted opening-up measures according to the industrial characteristics, enhance the open-oriented policy measures within the service industry, make good use of the BRICS cooperation mechanism for involvement in the formulation of service trade rules, so as to promote the high-quality development of China's service industry.

Keywords: the opening-up of service industry, policy measures, experience and enlightenments, OECD Service Trade Restrictions Index, the BRICS countries