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EU Consumer Commissioner, Meglena Kuneva, the US Chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Nancy Nord, and the Chinese vice-Minister of AQSIQ, Wei Chuanzhong, met in Brussels for the first high-level trilateral summit on product safety. The high level meeting is intended to send a strong political signal of the determination of all sides to keep product safety at the top of the international political agenda, recognising that open markets can only be built on strong and secure management of global product supply chains.

The US and European economies sent a far more realistic message last week about the outlook for the global economy than the weekend's Group of 20 meeting of leaders from the globe's 20 largest economies did in Washington.

JATO Dynamics reports that the US car market is currently behind Europe and Japan in the global drive for more fuel efficient cars.

While online shopping is expected to increase worldwide in 2008, there is a clear difference between the online purchasing habits of the US consumer versus his/her counterpart in the UK. In fact, the average UK consumer will spend 40 percent more online than the average US consumer and make 24 percent more purchases online, according to a new study from JupiterResearch and commissioned by LinkShare, a leading pay-per-action marketing network provider.

Leaders of the largest global pharmaceutical companies recognize the need for transformational change in their organizations, but will need to move swiftly to ensure sustained growth for the sector. Current global financial conditions and the threat of a broad recession have accelerated the timetable for implementing change, as the industry confronts lower corporate stock prices and an increasingly cost-averse customer. These and other findings were released in Progressions, Executing for success: powering new business models, Ernst & Young's bi-annual global pharmaceutical report.

With the global economy showing more and more signs of slowing down, mobile messaging growth will continue. In a recent report from ABI Research, mobile messaging services revenues will grow from $151 billion in 2008 to greater than $212 billion globally by 2013. Supply side drivers will be of primary importance for maintaining this level of growth.

The majority of executives around the world indicated that they are willing to relocate internationally for job opportunities in today's tumultuous economy, according to Korn/Ferry's latest Executive Quiz.

The level of global retail theft reached $104.5 billion in the past year, leading to increased costs for both retailers and consumers alike. The second annual Global Retail Theft Barometer found that while global retail shrink as a percentage of total sales has declined slightly in the past 12 months, the overall cost of retail crime has increased substantially.

Salaries in 2008 have decreased across the board for nearly all sectors, job levels, and regions of the world in the anti-money laundering/counter-terrorist financing field, an annual global survey shows.

The standardised unemployment rate for the OECD area was 6.0% in September 2008, the same as the previous month and 0.4 percentage point higher than a year earlier.