The International Monetary Fund on Thursday said it was sending a team to Spain next week in preparation for a new report on the country's banking sector reform.

The IMF staff team will start discussions Tuesday in Madrid with the authorities and private-sector representatives to produce the Fund's third independent monitoring report of Spain's banking sector, IMF spokeswoman Angela Gaviria said in a statement.

Moody's has raised Turkey's bond rating to investment grade, the rating agency said Thursday, citing improved economic and public finance measures and progress on reforms.

The government-bond ratings went up a notch to Baa3, the first step into investment grade, from Ba1, with outlook considered stable.

Japan's premier will Friday unveil the next stage of his plan to reboot the economy, reports said, as he seeks to capitalise on the feel-good mood of a soaraway stock market and a plunging yen.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is set to announce broadbrush outlines of the third of his "three arrows" of a plan dubbed "Abenomics", which is intended to turn around years of deflation in the world's third-largest economy.

State-rescued Royal Bank of Scotland axed 1,400 more positions on Thursday, taking the total number of job losses close to 40,000 since its vast state bailout at the height of the global financial crisis.

"RBS has announced plans to restructure its retail head office functions in the UK. The changes will result in 1,400 job losses over the next two years," said in a statement.

Japan said Thursday that its economy grew again in the quarter to March, pointing to a recovery as Tokyo and its hand-picked central bank team set about stoking the world's third-largest economy.

The 0.9 percent on-quarter growth -- or 3.5 percent on an annualized basis if the data were stretched over a year -- confirmed Japan's exit from recession as consumers spent more, although the nation's cautious firms did not follow suit.

State owned Kuwait Airways Co has chosen Airbus over the Boeing Co on the purchase or lease of new airplanes, Kuwaiti Communications Minister Salem al-Othaina said on Wednesday.

"KAC received two offers from Airbus and Boeing and the board of directors approved the offer from Airbus because it is lower in cost," Othaina told the official KUNA news agency.

New Zealand on Thursday bucked the international trend toward austerity budgets and lifted spending modestly, while still predicting its books will be back in the black within two years.

Finance Minister Bill English said that after taking a battering from the global financial crisis and the deadly Christchurch earthquake in 2011, prospects were looking good for New Zealand's economy.

The International Monetary Fund on Wednesday approved a $1.33 billion (1.0 billion euro) bailout loan for Cyprus and released the first $110.7 million to the Cypriot government.

The loan is part of a combined $13 billion (10 billion euro) emergency financing deal set by the IMF and the European Stability Mechanism that aims to support the government as it seeks to stabilize the ravaged Cypriot banking sector.

France fell into recession in the first quarter of this year with the economy shrinking by 0.2 percent, official figures showed Wednesday, in further bad news for President Francois Hollande's embattled Socialist government.

The data from the official INSEE statistics agency came exactly a year after Hollande's inauguration, with the president already struggling to tackle a 16-year high in unemployment and record-low approval ratings.

Asia-focused bank HSBC announced on Wednesday that it will make another $2-3 billion (1.5-2.3 billion euros) of new cost savings by 2016, extending its restructuring plans.

The lender said in a statement that it will seek the additional sustainable cost savings on top of its wide-ranging restructuring process that was launched in 2011.