BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Coronavirus infections have started to rise again in Hungary, probably due to the spread of the variant of the disease first detected in Britain, Prime Minister Viktor Orban told state radio on Friday. However, Orban said there was no need for further lockdown measures to curb the spread, as a planned acceleration of inoculations with Russian and Chinese vaccines could offset the rise in cases in coming weeks. If we start inoculations with the Chinese vaccine as well, by Easter we will be able to vaccinate all the (more than 2 million) people who have registered for vaccines, Orban said. Hungary expects to receive 500,000 doses of Chinese firm Sinopharm s vaccine next week and plans to start administering it soon, becoming the first EU country to use it. This week Hungary became the first European Union member to administer Russia s Sputnik V vaccine, after its regulator granted the shot emergency use approval rather than waiting for a green light from the EU s Eur
A federal control board that oversees Puerto Rico’s finances says it has reached an agreement in principal with creditors to reduce a portion of the U.S. territory’s more than $70 billion public debt load
CALGARY, Alberta, Feb. 09, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) When tackling today’s fiscal challenges, the Alberta government can learn some key lessons from the Klein era of the 1990s, finds a new study released today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think tank. “Successive governments in Alberta have repeated many of the mistakes of the pre-Klein era, including an overreliance on natural resource revenue and high levels of spending, which has produced deficits and rapid debt accumulation,” said Tegan Hill, Fraser Institute economist and co-author of Lessons for Fiscal Reform from the Klein Era. For example, prior to the 2008/09 recession, Alberta held $43.0 billion (inflation-adjusted) more in assets than it did in debt —in other words, it was Canada’s only debt-free province. Since then, due to government spending growth, nearly uninterrupted budget deficits (and the recent impact of the COVID recession and low oil