International Economy - Current Affairs for January, 2015

China toppled the US in 2014 as the world's largest recipient of the FDI- a position that the US had been holding almost consistently since the 1980's- though with a modest increase of 3 per cent. The top five FDI hosts in 2014 were China with 128 billion US dollar, followed by Hong Kong 111 billion dollar, the United States 86 billion, Singapore 81 billion dollar and Brazil 62 billion dollar.

Growth was down by 4.3 percentage points compared to 2012 and 1.6 percentage points lower than that for 2013. China's annual economic growth slowed to 7.4 percent last year, the weakest expansion in 24 years. The Ministry said, slower growth is in line with the weak performance of industrial output, consumption, investment and corporate profits.

ECB would purchase sovereign debt starting from March 2015 until the end of September 2016 in an effort to release €60 billion euros ($68 billion) a month into the European economy.

For this year and the next year, the IMF has predicted growth of 3.5 per cent and 3.7 per cent, a reduction of 0.3 percentage points, compared with the earlier forecast published in October last year.

The defence budget includes plan to buy surveillance aircraft, drones and F-35 fighter jets to help counter rising assertiveness of China.