Page 16 - IBT October 2020

Asian stocks continue
to struggle

Asia’s stock markets struggled to emulate Wall Street’s
rebound on Wednesday as persistent worries about the
global economic recovery kept investors cautious while
ebbing inflation expectations helped the US dollar to a
two-month high. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific
shares outside Japan was steady after two days of
declines, but the mood was hardly bullish.
Japan’s Nikkei returned from a two-day holiday to drop 0.6
percent. Markets in Shanghai and Hong Kong opened flat,
the ASX 200 rose 1.6 percent and South Korea’s Kospi fell
0.8 percent on a jump in coronavirus infections

$3.5tr worker wages lost
amid pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic is taking a heavier toll on jobs than
previously feared with hundreds of millions of jobs lost and
workers suffering a "massive" drop in earnings. In a fresh
study, the International Labour Organization (ILO) found that
by the mid-year point, global working hours had declined by
17.3 percent compared to last December -- equivalent to nearly
500 million full-time jobs.
That is nearly 100 million more job-equivalents than the number
forecast by the ILO back in June when it expected 14 percent of Facebook
working hours to be lost by the end of the second three-month
period of the year. "The impact has been catastrophic," ILO chief within the tax net
Guy Ryder told reporters in a virtual briefing, pointing out that
global labor income had shrunk by 10.7 percent during the first The National Board of Revenue's (NBR) efforts to
nine months of the year compared to the same period in 2019. make Facebook fall in line with local regulations
That amounts to a drop of some $3.5 trillion, or 5.5 percent of have started to pay off as the global social media
the overall global gross domestic product (GDP). giant handed about Tk 1.7 crore in value-added
tax for the months of July and August.
Facebook's authorized sales partner Httpool has
handed over the VAT to the state coffer. It also
solved the mystery of how much Facebook earns
from Bangladeshi companies, which are now
increasingly relying on digital platforms for
advertisements. In August, the Facebook agent
sold advertisements worth Tk 6.23 crore to
various local organizations. In return, they paid
Tk 91.39 lakh in VAT. As per the rules, the NBR
gets 15 percent in VAT and another 4 percent in
advance income tax.

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