Tag Archives: 3.) Swissinfo Business and Economy

The Conference on Afghanistan on November 28, 2018. With the exception of a few organisations and institutions that continue to operate in person, such as the UN Human Rights Council, which is currently conducting its Universal Periodic Review process, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the WHO and some permanent missions to the United Nations, most day-to-day business and multilateral activities are conducted online. March 2020 marked a major...

The dispute centres around a Swiss attempt to uniformise functions across ATMs from different providers. © Keystone / Alexandra Wey The competition authority suspects the global credit card firm of using its position to prevent the rollout of a new, more uniform, ATM system across Switzerland. COMCO said on Tuesday it had launched an investigation on February 8 after a complaint by the Swiss financial infrastructure company SIX, which is responsible for developing...

Swiss residential property may offer quality that is high, but so are the prices. Keystone / Arno Balzarini Residential property prices in Switzerland rose sharply in the final quarter of 2020, and by an average 2.5% for the year as a whole, according to the Federal Statistics Office. This is according to the Swiss Residential Property Price Index published for the second time by the FSO on Tuesday. The new index climbed by 2.3% in the fourth quarter compared to the...

Florian Fox © Rob Lewis Photography What’s it like to move back to – or away from – Switzerland during a pandemic? What does gold mined in Peru have to do with Switzerland? Did you know that “nostalgia” is a Swiss invention? Not content to mind her own business, Susan studied journalism in Boston so she’d have the perfect excuse to put herself in other people’s shoes and worlds. When not writing, she presents and produces podcasts and videos. More about the...

View of the Europaalle urban development in Zurich on April 12, 2019. © Keystone / Christian Beutler The share of foreign investment in Swiss commercial real estate fell from 15% before 2011 to 5% between 2017 and 2019, according to new research. The issue of foreigners buying cheap Swiss property during the Covid-19 pandemic is being discussed in Bern. Foreign investment in commercial buildings in Switzerland reached CHF750 million ($841 million) a year, or an...

Shoppers most often chose traditional retailers such as Migros and Coop over discounters and specialty shops for their groceries. Keystone / Laurent Gillieron Consumers spent 11.3% more on food and beverages in brick-and-mortar shops last year than they did in 2019, helping the food retail trade to pull in a record turnover of nearly CHF30 billion ($33.7 billion). In total, the average household spent CHF7,680 on comestibles, according to figures released on Thursday...

More people opted for a car over public transport last year. © Keystone / Gaetan Bally A third of Swiss people chose not to travel on holiday last year as the coronavirus pandemic gripped the world, according to automobile association Touring Club Switzerland (TCS). Of those people who continued to commute to work, a greater proportion opted to get to the office under their own steam rather than take public transport. These are the findings of a TCS survey of 1,297...

e-id-referendum.ch Lawyer and parliamentarian Sibel Arslan explains why she is against the proposed new law on digital identity (eID) and why rejecting it would be an opportunity for digitisation. The government and parliament have drafted a national law on digital identity to regulate the identification of people on the internet. The vote booklet advises that the law would provide a sound basis for simple, safe and government-approved digital identities. On March 7,...

An extra 6,000 people registered at the unemployment office in January. © Keystone / Christian Beutler The unemployment rate in Switzerland rose again in January, reaching 3.7% – the highest level since April 2010. The impact of the coronavirus crisis continues to be felt on the Swiss economy. At the end of January, 169,753 people were registered as unemployed with the Regional Employment Offices, which is 6,208 more than the previous month. Compared to January...

Around 90% of federal funds go towards livestock protection measures like herd-protection dogs. Keystone / Peter Schneider The federal government spends CHF4 million (around $4.4 million) a year to minimise the damage caused by predators like wolves and lynx. Of this amount some three million Swiss francs are being invested in the protection of herds and flocks, the government revealed in its response to a question from a parliamentarian. Farmers receive around 70%...