GENEVA (Reuters) – Global airline net profits will halve this year as rising costs, especially oil prices, offset increasing demand, the industry body IATA said on Wednesday.

The result would be a net profit margin this year of only 1.4 percent — dismissed by IATA Director-General Giovanni Bisignani as more worthy of a charity than an industry — down from 2.9 percent in 2010.

GENEVA, March 2 (Reuters) – Global airline net profits will
halve this year as rising costs, especially oil prices, offset
increasing demand, the industry body IATA said on Wednesday.

The result would be a net profit margin this year of only
1.4 percent — dismissed by IATA Director-General Giovanni
Bisignani as more worthy of a charity than an industry — down
from 2.9 percent in 2010.

GENEVA, Feb 23 (Reuters) – International trade volumes
exceeded pre-crisis levels for the first time in December, and
global trade expanded by a record 15.1 percent in the whole of
2010, the Dutch CPB economic institute said on Wednesday.

The data were further evidence of a buoyant global economy,
with the full-year expansion in trade more than compensating for
the 13.0 percent contraction in 2009 in the wake of the
financial crisis, it said in its monthly world trade monitor.

GENEVA, Feb 22 (Reuters) – Long-running talks on a global
trade deal are at last making progress but the pace of work is
nowhere near fast enough to meet a new self-imposed deadline of
the end of the year, senior trade officials said on Tuesday.

World Trade Organization Director-General Pascal Lamy told
the body’s General Council that member states must speed up
their efforts, and trade powers expressed concern that what many
see as the last chance for a Doha round deal is slipping away.

GENEVA (Reuters) – The long-running Doha trade talks have finally started to move after a constructive week of talks among key powers that grappled with issues of substance, the U.S. envoy to the World Trade Organization said on Thursday.

The comments, by U.S. ambassador Michael Punke, were one of the strongest signs yet that an intensified push to conclude the decade-old negotiations this year were finally bearing fruit.

GENEVA (Reuters) – Environmental activists are hopeful that negotiations at the World Trade Organization to curb fisheries subsidies, especially those on fuel, can produce a deal that will help end overfishing.

Agreement would not only help reverse the alarming depletion of global fish stocks and contribute to a broader trade deal in the WTO’s long-running Doha round, but would provide a template for tackling global problems such as climate change that have a trade dimension.

GENEVA (Reuters) – World leaders have so far failed to give the necessary impetus to a new trade deal and agreement in the long-running Doha round is far from certain, former WTO Director-General Peter Sutherland said on Tuesday.

Failure to clinch a deal would not only deprive the world of an economic boost of at least $360 billion, according to the Irish lawyer and banker, a former European Commissioner.