Economy News Notes

Seeking to lessen its dependence on Iran crude oil in view of rising tensions due to sanctions by the U.S. and the EU against Iran, India on Thursday asked Saudi Arabia for an additional 5 million tonnes of crude oil for next fiscal.
India buys 27 million tonnes of crude oil per annum from Saudi Arabia while its annual import from Iran is about 17 million tonnes.
India also sought more LPG from Saudi Arabia to meet growing energy needs.
In a related development, state-owned Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL) has decided to double crude oil imports from Saudi Arabia next fiscal and cut purchases from Iran by over 14 per cent.

During its response to the worst financial-economic crisis in a generation, the World Bank failed to adequately tailor its lending patterns to the severity of the downturn across nations and today finds itself with potentially insufficient headroom to respond to a second crisis of similar or greater magnitude to the one in 2008-09, should there be one.
These worrying results were part of a phase-two study of the Bank's crisis response, presented in a report, titled The World Bank's Response to the Global Economic Crisis: Phase II.
Regarding the inadequate change in the Bank's pre-crisis lending patterns, the IEG (Independent Evaluation Group) suggested that in part this phenomenon was driven by country demand for bank lending, and hence countries that were most engaged with the Bank before the crisis — its ‘good clients' such as India and Indonesia — tended to approach bank more and in some cases get loans prepared loans more quickly.
Nevertheless, India was one of the Bank's “largest borrowers in crisis,” Dr. Anjali Kumar (lead author of the report and a Lead Economist with the IEG) noted, adding that it was sanctioned $7 billion in lending during crisis, of which $5 billion was tied to crisis-specific operations. Despite these large-scale commitments, some of them remained unrealised, including $3 billion for the financial sector were cancelled.