The British minister charged with boosting international trade post-Brexit has slammed the country's businesses as being too "fat and lazy" to capitalise on the opportunity, the Times newspaper reported Saturday.

"This country is not the free-trading nation that it once was," Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox told a reception for Conservative activists in the House of Commons on Thursday. 

Cuba said Friday the United States's 54-year-old trade embargo has cost the island $4.7 billion since April 2015 despite the former Cold War enemies' historic rapprochement.

France's government unveiled Friday plans to lower taxes on households and companies, as the ruling Socialists lined up their budget for the 2017 election year.

China's producer prices fell at their slowest rate for more than four years in August, the government said Friday, another sign of stabilisation in the world's second-largest economy.

Nigeria's presidency on Thursday said it had approved an external borrowing plan after the cash-strapped African economy plunged into official recession.

British group Micro Focus will merge with some of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's software assets, the pair said, in a further consolidation of the global tech sector after SoftBank's blockbuster purchase of ARM Holdings.

The EU will not allow Britain to cling to advantages for its financial industry while blocking free movement of labor in the wake of Brexit, commissioner Valdis Dombrovsksis warned on Thursday.

"We cannot tolerate cherry-picking," the Brussels financial services chief told German business daily Handelsblatt.

Mexico's finance minister Luis Videgaray resigned Wednesday following Donald Trump's controversial visit to the country, with the US Republican presidential candidate boasting it showed his trip had been a success.

"I let them know where the United States stands," Trump said during a televised forum with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

German auto giant Volkswagen and China's Anhui Jianghuai Automobile are in talks to build electric cars together, the firms announced Wednesday, the latest possible tie-up in a burgeoning Chinese market for clean-energy vehicles.

Australia's economy is growing at its fastest annual rate in four years, the government said Wednesday, as it trumpeted a quarter of a century of continued expansion.

Growth hit 3.3 percent from a year earlier in the second quarter of 2016, with government spending helping to offset falling trade as the economy shifts away from a decades-long resources-led boom.