Global stocks sank Wednesday after US President Donald Trump said he was not satisfied with talks that are aimed at averting a trade war with China. Equities were also dented by poor eurozone economic data, and as Trump cast doubt on a planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “Trump (is) continuing to drive uncertainty over global trade,” said analyst Joshua Mahony at trading firm IG. “European markets are following their Asian counterparts lower, as a pessimistic tone from Trump is compounded by downbeat economic data,” he added. Markets had surged Monday after US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He said they had agreed to pull back from imposing threatened tariffs on billions of dollars of goods, and continue talks on a variety of trade issues. However, Trump has declared that he was “not satisfied” with the status of the talks, fuelling worries that the world’s top two economies could still slug out an economically pain...
The World Economic Forum has ranked Nigeria 122, four places behind the previous year, in the 2017 Global Gender Gap Report. The GGGR is a framework for capturing the magnitude and scope of gender-based disparities and tracking their progress over time. Since 2006, when the reports were first published to include more than 100 countries, the lowest ranks have been occupied by some of the most populous developing countries. It was in this same year that Nigeria ranked her highest yet: 94 out of 114 countries. Eleven years later, 30 more countries added, and Nigeria has moved 28 places below. While the current report notes that a total of 68 percent of the world’s gender gap is now closed, with the reversal driven by declining gender equality in the workplace and political representation, we examine Nigeria’s stagnancy on the GGG table. It’s been eleven years of motion yet no movement for Nigerian females. As it is in many African countries, being a woman in Nigeria is quite dauntin...