Connaught Place eighth most expensive office place in world: CBRE

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Connaught Place eighth most expensive office place in world: CBRE - Economic Times You are here: Home>Collections>CbreConnaught Place eighth most expensive office place in world: CBREPTI Jun 19, 2014, 08.04PM ISTTags:place|office place|net worth|markets|Insurability|Expensive|endorsements|Delhi|Connaught Place|CBRE(Connaught Place in Delhi…)

NEW DELHI: Connaught Place in Delhi has slipped one notch to become the world's eighth costliest office destination, property consultant CBRE said today.

Mumbai's Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC) was ranked sixteenth, and Nariman Point at thirty-second in the list of Top 50 Costliest Global Office Markets.

Delhi's Connaught Place was ranked seventh, while Mumbai's BKC and Nariman Point were at 15th and 32nd positions, respectively, in the previous list released in December 2013.

body{margin:0px;}google_ad_client=\"ca-pub-8415620659137418\";google_ad_slot=\"3278470286\";google_ad_width=\"640\";google_ad_height=\"160\";google_ad_channel=\"9126527482,1000001854,1000000195\";google_adtest=\"off\";google_safe=\"high\";google_hints=\"office market office place connaught place london west end\";google_max_num_ads=\"4\";google_override_format=true;google_page_url=\"http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-06-19/news/50711147_1_occupancy-cost-cbre-prime-office-space\";");document.close();})();' frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="640" height="160">

"London's West End remained the world's highest-priced office market followed by Hong Kong (Central) and Beijing (Finance Street)," CBRE said in a statement.

According to CBRE's semi-annual Global Prime Office Occupancy Costs survey, London West End's topped the list with overall occupancy costs of USD 277 per sq ft a year.

"At more than USD 150 per sq ft per annum, Delhi's traditional central business district (CBD) of Connaught Place was ranked as the eighth most expensive office market in the world," CBRE said.

Commenting on the report, CBRE South Asia Chairman & MD Anshuman Magazine said: "This downward change in rankings in the CBD is due to a recovering global market. However locally the demand levels remain stable and due to lack of new supply values remain high".

CBRE tracks occupancy costs for prime office space in 126 markets around the globe. The survey provided data on office rents and occupancy costs as of March 31, 2014.

Despite a drop in rankings by one spot over the previous survey, CBRE noted that Connaught Place remains highly sought after by corporate office occupiers, because of its central location and connectivity to the rest of the city.

During January-March quarter, rental remained high due to limited supply of prime space. The occupancy cost of CP rose by 1.2 per cent year-on-year. Vacancy rates dropped marginally amid strong leasing activities.

"Global prime office occupancy costs rose 2.3 per cent year-over-year, led by the Americas (up 3.3 per cent) and Asia Pacific (up 2.9 per cent)," CBRE said.

Of the top 50 'most expensive' markets, 21 were in EMEA, 20 were in Asia Pacific and 9 were in the Americas.

The total occupancy cost of Hong Kong (Central), ranked second in the list, stood at USD 242 per sq ft followed by Beijing's Finance Street at USD 194 per sq ft, Beijing's CBD at USD 187 per sq ft and Moscow at USD 165 per sq ft.

body{margin:0px;}google_ad_client=\"ca-pub-8415620659137418\";google_ad_slot=\"3278470286\";google_ad_width=\"640\";google_ad_height=\"110\";google_ad_channel=\"9126527482,1000001854,1000000195\";google_adtest=\"off\";google_safe=\"high\";google_hints=\"office market office place connaught place london west end\";google_max_num_ads=\"2\";google_override_format=true;google_page_url=\"http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-06-19/news/50711147_1_occupancy-cost-cbre-prime-office-space\";");document.close();})();' frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="640" height="110">FEATURED ARTICLESNarendra Modi's list of top 10 priorities for the economyStep-by-step guide to file your income tax return onlineIndian engineering graduates' degrees to be recognised across 17 countriesMore:Indian engineering graduates' degrees to be recognised across 17 countries10 best tax-saving investmentsIndia's first e-reader Wink unveiled, supporting 15 languagesBudget 2014: How PM Narendra Modi's first Budget may look likeFed warns of catastrophe if $14.3-trn debt limit not raised10 steps to file your income tax return online body{margin:0px;}google_ad_client=\"ca-pub-8415620659137418\";google_ad_slot=\"4755203488\";google_ad_width=\"300\";google_ad_height=\"250\";google_ad_channel=\"9126527482,1000001854,1000000195\";google_adtest=\"off\";google_safe=\"high\";google_hints=\"office market office place connaught place london west end\";google_max_num_ads=\"4\";google_override_format=true;google_page_url=\"http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-06-19/news/50711147_1_occupancy-cost-cbre-prime-office-space\";");document.close();})();' frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="300" height="250"> RELATED ARTICLESConnaught Place seventh costliest office mkt in world: CBRE
December 19, 2013Delhi's Connaught Place fourth costliest office location in...
February 20, 2013Connaught Place eighth costliest office location in world...
February 18, 2014IN-DEPTH COVERAGECbreConnaught Place© 2014 Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All rights reservedIndex by Keyword|Index by Datewww.economictimes.comFeedback|Privacy Policy|Terms of Use|Advertise with us document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + (document.location.protocol == "https:" ? "https://sb" : "http://b") + ".scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js' %3E%3C/script%3E")); COMSCORE.beacon({ c1:2, c2:6036484, c3:"", c4:"", c5:"", c6:"", c15:"" });

Djibouti takes DP World concession terminal container

Bruce Barnard, special correspondent | July 10, 2014 9:53 AM EDT

Djibouti has canceled the right of exploitation of DP World to the Doraleh Container Terminal and began the procedure of arbitration on alleged corruption.

Twitter continues cutting of Brazil, the world great open wound

text is null
Parameter name: text

The Economist explains: Why the first world war wasn't really

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

THE world—or, at least, those parts of it that participated in the original events—has recently taken great interest in the first world war. Its almost casual beginning, between June 28th 1914, when the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated by a Bosnian nationalist and the first days of August, when Germany declared war on Russia and France, drawing in their ally Britain, has fascinated historians, while the horrors that followed have fascinated everyone, though in a rather different way. But does the conflict deserve its title? It was undoubtedly a world war. But it was certainly not the first. That laurel belongs to a war which broke out 160 years earlier, in 1754, and carried on until 1763. Though fighting did not start in Europe until 1756, and for this reason the conflict is known as the Seven Years’ War, it was truly global. Every inhabited continent except Australia saw fighting on its soil, and independent powers on three of those continents were active participants.

The first action of this first global conflict involved a young officer whose name may be familiar to some readers. On May 28th 1754 a small group of soldiers from the British colony of Virginia, under the command of a man called George Washington, engaged a group of French troops who were interloping from New France (ie Canada) into territory the British considered theirs. Instead of peacefully repelling them as he had been instructed, Washington ended up killing several of them, including their commanding officer. This campaign in North America then continued, with both sides in alliance with local Indian nations, until, two years later, Britain’s ally Prussia attacked the small German state of Saxony, bringing Saxony’s ally Austria, and thus Austria’s ally France (and therefore France’s enemy and Prussia’s ally, Britain), into the conflict. It is a sequence of events eerily similar to the way that in 1914 an attack by Germany’s ally Austria on the small Balkan state of Serbia brought in Serbia’s ally Russia, which then threatened Germany, which then declared war on both Russia and Russia’s ally France.

The war rapidly globalised. Both Britain and France reinforced their colonial troops in North America, and started attacking each other’s colonies in the West Indies and trading stations in Africa and India. In India, some of the princely states which had recently emerged from the dying Mughal empire also got involved, and Britain ended up taking over one of them, Bengal. The war came to South America when, near its end, Spain joined the French side and attacked one of the American colonies of Britain’s ally, Portugal.

Like the first world war, this global conflict reshaped the globe. Indeed, it is the reason why the modern world is an English-speaking one. As a colonial power, France was destroyed, and did not return seriously to the business of overseas conquest until it attacked Algeria in 1830. All of North America east of the Mississipi became British, save the city of New Orleans, which became Spanish. And the foundations of British rule in India were laid as well. As for George Washington, he ended up leading a rebel army put together by colonials who, freed from fear of French encirclement, unwilling to help pay for the war that had given them that freedom, and frustrated by British protection of the lands of their Indian allies from encroachment by colonial property speculators (including Washington himself), decided that they would rather go it alone.

Dig deeper:
Learning from the first president (June 2013)
A century on, there are uncomfortable parallels with 1914 (December 2013)
Europe's commemorations could end a 100-year haunting (November 2013)

So why does The Economist pedantically insist on calling the First World War the 'first world war', as if it were a descriptive term? Surely it deserves capitalization because it is a specific instance that everyone recognizes as a named event, not a description.
For example, if you are happy with the Seven Years War, because the seven years war might be ambiguous with other wars that lasted 7 years, and you are happy with WWI as an abbreviation, then why not the First World War and the Second World War?
If you insist on decapitalizing these two wars, I shall have to start calling you the economist. Vague and ambiguous? I hope so. If you get really opinionated about only using lower case, I shall call you the e.e.conomist.

First, believing that we do not speak French because of the Seven Years' War is a fallacy. If we spoke French at all, it was going to be because they aided us in our separation from England.

Secondly, French, also German and English (of course) were debated as being the native tongue of our new country. The people back then were far more adept at speaking multiple languages because of their foundations. We are lazy today, and think that this is just bullocks.

Third, "All of North America east of the Mississipi became British, save the city of New Orleans, which became Spanish," is entirely incorrect. New Orleans was never Spanish. Have you ever been there? Goodness son, they're the Cajun French for a reason. Texas and Florida, however, were still Spanish and Georgia was only taken to be a buffer zone between the Colonies and the Spanish, while serving doubly as a penal place for criminals to be sent.

Fourth, as an author, you should make it a point to better reference your broad statements or allow those of us who are Historians, to enlighten others on such matters. This essay/article/writing is a ridiculous opinion on something that has little to no quantitative proof, unlike WWI. This is why your thoughts are dubious at best.

Germany and the first world war: Do mention the war

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

THE Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) and the German foreign ministry have organised a series of debates in Berlin to commemorate the centenary of the start of the first world war. For the past few months, historians, authors and politicians from Germany and abroad have spent happy hours debating both “the failure and use of diplomacy” in the summer of 1914 and the lessons that should be drawn from it. In one of the most interesting discussions, Christopher Clark, the Australian author of the bestselling “Sleepwalkers”, and Gerd Krumeich, German co-author of “Deutschland im Ersten Weltkrieg” (“Germany in the first world war”), showed that the question of German blame for the war remains very much unresolved. Whereas Mr Clark underlined the fact that senior military figures in a number of European countries, not just Germany, were keen for war, Mr Krumeich emphasised the enormous quantity of Germany's armaments and its hunger for expansion. He also pointed to its unwillingness to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia that was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914.

Alongside the debates, film screenings and lectures the museum is staging an exhibition linked to the war. Here the focus is violence, rather than diplomacy. The museum, which until 1875 was a Prussian arsenal, owns a huge collection of objects from the period, including uniforms, helmets, guns, gas masks, cannons, flags, letters and postcards, paintings and photos. Many are on display. Of the dozens of exhibitions that will open across Germany this summer, this claims to be the only one offering an overview of the war in both its European and global contexts. The exhibition does not itself try to clarify the Schuldfrage ("question of guilt"), but it clearly shows the atrocities committed by German troops in the occupied cities of Brussels and Petrograd (now St Petersburg) using facts, film clips and photos. 

A gas mask dating from 1917 epitomises another unpalatable part of the conflict: the Germans' first use of chlorine gas in April 1915 against French troops in the trenches, killing thousands. In the "Home Front" section of the exhibition, graphics by Heinrich Zille, a popular Berlin illustrator, and paintings such as “War Winter” by Hans Baluschek indicate the devastating impact that Germany’s ever-growing weapons industry had on the population in the winter of 1916-1917: hunger, shortage of coal and the collapse of the railway network. Elsewhere, newspaper clippings and propaganda posters reveal the support German intellectuals broadly offered the war.

At a time of conflict in eastern Europe and concern about the future of European monetary union (and even of the whole "European project"), there is something oddly relevant about these displays. As Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s foreign minister, commented during one debate: "A hundred years after the start of the first world war...the issue of war and peace, or of the unity and disruption of our continent, is back on the agenda.”

"The First World War" is at the Deutsches Historisches Museum until November 30th 2014

The picture is of a painting by Fritz Grotemeye (1918) showing German soldiers fighting near Tanga, in German East Africa (now Tanzania)

One commenter has said that WW1 may be a mystery, but I don't believe so. WW1 had multiple, identifiable factors. Gavrillo Princep may have lit the fuse, but he was hardly the reason the powder kegs were there in the first place. A tumultuous Balkans promised to be the black hole it ended up being, magnifying minor disputes and sucking in Great Powers. Germans felt encircled, and they weren't really mistaken in believing so. Nor was their encirclement entirely of their making. An almost churlish failure on the apart of the established powers (particularly Britain) to accept and accommodate Germany's rise also deserves a good deal of blame. The book "Sleepwalkers" details beautifully how, gradually, any assertive action by Berlin was viewed as either sinister or spitefully pig-headed, while the same action by London was morally right and a geopolitical necessity. France's obsession with Alsace and Lorraine and its medieval notions of where Gaul began and Germany ended were incompatible with peace, no matter who was Kaiser. We all know about the Schlieffen Plan, but who knows of France's Plan XVII?

Then there are the structural and cultural problems, such as the convoluted alliance system and a general jingoistic fervor that bordered on mental insanity. Was Berlin completely blameless? Of course not. Not even close. But it is nice to see that the discussion of WW1 is easing away from silly notions of an insane Kaiser and a sinister General Staff plotting together with cartoonish villainy to set the world ablaze and unleash hell upon an innocent and unsuspecting continent.

bampbs Jun 24th 2014 21:15 GMT

At a time of conflict in eastern Europe and concern about the future of European monetary union (and even of the whole "European project"), there is something oddly relevant about these displays. As Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s foreign minister commented during one debate: "100 years after the start of the first world war...the issue of war and peace, or of the unity and disruption of our continent, is back on the agenda.”

That last paragraph is genuinely silly. Before WW1, war was considered a positive good, a way to promote the "Survival of the Fittest". But WW1 taught that modern war, where the great majority of casualties were caused by artillery, yielded only the random survival of the lucky.

I don't hear any voices in Europe even hinting that war is, in itself, a good thing.

Tackle food waste and feed the world

"If food was as expensive as a Ferrari, we would polish it and look after it."

Instead, we waste staggering amounts.

So says Professor Per Pinstrup-Andersen, head of an independent panel of experts advising the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization on how to tackle the problem.

Some 40% of all the food produced in the United States is never eaten. In Europe, we throw away 100 million tonnes of food every year.

And yet there are one billion starving people in the world.

The FAO's best guess is that one third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted before it is eaten.

Continue reading the main story

28% of farmland grows food that will be thrown away

6-10% of greenhouse gases come from waste food

39% of household food waste is fruit and vegetables

The latest report from the expert panel of the UN Committee on World Food Security concludes that food waste happens for many different reasons in different parts of the world and therefore the solutions have to be local.

Take Chris Pawelski, a fourth generation onion farmer from the US. Mr Pawelski has spent months growing onions in the rich, black soil of Orange County, New York, but the supermarkets he sells to will only accept onions of certain size and look.

Chris Pawelski works with a food charity to ensure all of his produce finds a home

"If it's too wet or too dry, the bulbs simply won't make the two-inch size that's required," he says.

"There might be imperfections and nicks. There's nothing wrong with that onion. It's fine to eat. But the consumer, according to the grocery store chain, doesn't want that sort of onion."

In the past, rejected onions would have been sent to rot in a landfill. Now Mr Pawelski works with a local food charity, City Harvest, to redistribute his edible but imperfect-looking onions.

City Harvest says in 2014 it will rescue 46 million pounds - about 21 million kilograms - of food from local farmers, restaurants, grocers and manufacturers for redistribution to urban food programmes.

Onions can be rejected by supermarkets because of their size as Michelle Fleury reports

In rich countries, supermarkets, consumers and the catering industry are responsible for most wasted food. But supermarkets have come under particular pressure to act.

UK supermarket chain Waitrose is attacking food waste in all parts of its business. The upmarket grocery chain cuts prices in order to sell goods that are close to their "sell by" date, donates leftovers to charity and sends other food waste to bio-plants for electricity generation. The idea is for Waitrose to earn "zero landfill" status.

But then there are consumers like Tara Sherbrooke. A busy, working mother of two young children, she works hard to avoid wasting food but still finds herself throwing some of it away.

Working mother Tara Sherbrooke explains why she finds it a "challenge" not to waste food

"I probably waste about £20 worth of food every week," she says. "It's usually half-eaten packets of food that have gone past their 'best before' date."

In the UK, studies have shown that households throw away about seven million tonnes of food a year, when more than half of it is perfectly good to eat.

Part of the problem is poor shopping habits, but the confusion many consumers have with "use by" and "best before" food labels is also a factor. "Use by" refers to food that becomes unsafe to eat after the date, while "best before" is less stringent and refers more to deteriorating quality.

Plus, as Prof Pinstrup-Andersen points out, food in wealthy countries takes up only a relatively small proportion of income and so people can afford to throw food away.

In developing countries, the problem is one not of wealth but of poverty.

In India's soaring temperatures fruit and vegetables do not stay fresh on the market stall for long. Delhi has Asia's largest produce market and it does have a cold storage facility.

In Delhi, keeping fruit fresh is a big problem for stall holders

But it is not big enough and rotting food is left out in piles. There is not enough investment in better farming techniques, transportation and storage. It means lost income for small farmers and higher prices for poor consumers.

In terms of calories, farmers harvest the equivalent of 4,600 calories of food per person per day. But on average only 2,000 of those calories are actually eaten every day - meaning more than half the calories we produce are lost on their way from farm to dinner fork.

There is enough food for everyone, just a lot of inefficiency, the FAO report concludes.

The environmental impact of all this wasted food is enormous. The amount of land needed to grow all the food wasted in the world each year would be the size of Mexico.

The water used to irrigate wasted crops would be enough for the daily needs of nine million people. And wasted production contributes 10% to the greenhouse gas emissions of developed countries.

This plant in Brooklyn uses food scraps to produce energy

Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn, New York, is one project trying to reverse that environmental damage. The plant takes food scraps from local schools and restaurants and converts them into energy. Inside towering, silver eggs food waste is mixed with sewage sludge to create usable gas.

The pilot programme is particularly timely. New York City's restaurants will be required to stop sending food waste to landfills in 2015 and will have to turn to operations like these as alternatives.

So progress is being made. Waste food is high on the agenda politically and environmentally.

But there is still much more work to be done. As Prof Pinstrup-Andersen admits: "We don't really know how much food is being wasted. We just know it's a lot."