On April 5, Ukrhydroenergo announced a tender for voluntary motor vehicle insurance (CASCO) for the branches of the Cascade of Kyiv HPPs and PSPs, according to the Prozorro electronic public procurement system.
The expected value of the insurance services procurement is UAH 192.041 thousand.
The deadline for submitting documents for the tender is April 15.
“Ukrhydroenergo operates all major hydroelectric power plants located on the Ukrainian sections of the Dnipro and Dniester rivers. The total installed capacity of the company’s hydroelectric power plants is 5,744.8 MW. The state, represented by the Ministry of Energy, owns 100% of the company’s shares.
hull insurance, hydroelectric power plants, motor vehicle insurance, Prozorro, PSPPs, TENDER, UKRHYDROENERGO
The Polish Inspectorate for Agriculture and Food Quality (IJHARS) in Lublin has decided to ban the circulation of three batches of ice cream with a total weight of 8.48 tons imported from Ukraine due to defrosting.
The decision was immediately implemented, the inspectorate said in a post on the social media platform X on Sunday.
It is also noted that the day before IJHARS in Poznan decided to ban from the Polish market another batch of ice cream imported from Ukraine, totaling 1.44 tons, due to the lack of declaration of sweetener (aspartame) in the composition.
Earlier this week, the Polish Trade Inspectorate announced the largest ever fine of 1.5 million zlotys (about $380,000) imposed on an importing company for importing 11,500 tons of technical rapeseed and feed wheat from Ukraine as counterfeit products for further use in the form of food products.
In addition, it was decided to ban the import of 57.66 thousand tons of tomato paste from Ukraine due to the presence of mold.
A week earlier, IJHARS chief inspector Przemyslaw Rjodkiewicz said that 1.4% of batches of products from Ukraine, which the commission checked at the border, were rejected last year.
The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe is putting into circulation a new currency – Zimbabwe Gold (Zimbabwe Gold, or ZiG), writes MarketWatch with reference to its message.
ZiG will replace the Zimbabwean dollar and will be backed by gold, other precious metals and foreign currencies.
The new currency will help simplify monetary and financial relations, bring certainty and predictability to them, said the head of the national central bank John Mushayaavanhu.
The central bank will set the interest rate for borrowing in Zimbabwean gold at 20 percent against a global maximum of 130 percent for the former currency.
Banks will start converting account balances into the new currency on Friday. It will be put into circulation on Monday at a rate of 13.56 gold pieces per U.S. dollar, CNBC Africa reported.
Zimbabwe’s annual inflation accelerated to 55 percent in March from more than 47 percent a month earlier amid the collapse of the former national currency and the country’s economy’s reliance on the U.S. dollar.
The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe also cited problems with change in payments, including its issuance in the form of coupons or candy.
Since the beginning of 2024, the demand for neurological drugs, including antidepressants, as well as drugs used to treat dementia, epilepsy and antipsychotics, has been growing, Yevhen Zaika, regional director of the Acino pharma company, shares his observations.
“We see a significant increase in demand for neurological drugs: antidepressants, drugs for the treatment of dementia, epilepsy and antipsychotics,” he told Interfax-Ukraine.
Zaika noted an increase in demand for cardiac and endocrinology drugs, as well as an increase in the share of nutritional supplements in the sales structure.
Commenting on the current situation in the pharma market, the expert noted that since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, logistics has risen in price by 20-30%. To counteract blackouts, the Pharma Start plant in Kiev, which produces products for Acino, was equipped with two diesel generators, the office and production are provided with Starlink Internet.
Zaika said that Acino currently has 17 new products in development.
At the same time, he emphasized that Ukrainian requirements for the quality and manufacture of drugs are “very severe.”
“For example, the Ukrainian market applies the requirement for separate registration of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), which significantly increases the development time of new products, and also increases the cost of both developing and maintaining the active registration status of the product. In Europe, where we all aspire to, there is simply no such thing as AFI registration,” he said.
Commenting on the strategy of the company’s participation in budget procurement, Zaika noted that the volume of tender shipments grows annually in hryvnia equivalent, but the share of budget shipments remains approximately at the same level.
As reported, pharmacy sales in Ukraine in January-February 2024 increased in monetary terms by 21.6% compared to the same period of 2023 – up to UAH 32.331 billion, in physical terms – by 2.9% to 201.828 million packages. Pharmacy sales of medicinal products for two months of 2024 amounted to UAH 25.265 billion, which is 20.65% more than in the same period of 2023. At the same time, sales of drugs in physical terms increased by 2.6% to 142.869 million packs.
The Estonian Ministry of Finance expects zero growth of the country’s economy at the end of the current year.
According to the forecast published by the Ministry, the reduction in external demand in the second half of last year was stronger than expected, and the expected turn to economic recovery did not take place. This will have the consequence of the lack of growth in the current year.
The Ministry of Economy notes that last year, the exchange of goods contracted globally, driven by the cooling of the Chinese economy and geopolitical tensions. In developed countries and Europe, this was compounded by the rapid rise in interest rates, which was launched to curb inflation, and the deterioration in capital- and energy-intensive activities due to the energy crisis.
Nevertheless, according to the Ministry’s assessment, the factors restraining the development of the Estonian economy have been receding in recent years: price growth has slowed down, wage growth has continued, interest rates have gradually decreased, and there is no high unemployment.
The Estonian Ministry of Finance prepares a financial and economic forecast twice a year, in spring and summer.
Estonia’s GDP in 2023 has decreased by 3.1%. At the end of March 2024, the Bank of Estonia gave a forecast that the country’s GDP decline would slow down to “minus” 0.6% this year and the economy would grow by 3.2% in 2025.
Earlier Experts Club think tank and Maxim Urakin released a video analysis of how the GDP of the world’s largest economies has changed over the past decades, more video analysis is available here –
https://youtu.be/w5fF_GYyrIc?si=BsZmIUERHSBJrO_3
Subscribe to Experts Club YouTube channel here – https://www.youtube.com/@ExpertsClub
ECONOMIC GROWTH, ESTONIA, EXPERTS CLUB, GDP, MACROECONOMICS, MINISTRY OF FINANCE, URAKIN
