Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov on Saturday hailed his country's "solid transit potential" as he unveiled an international airport worth over $2 billion in the capital Ashgabat.

Berdymukhamedov said the new airport's two passenger terminals would have the capacity to serve 17 million passengers a year while the freight terminal could handle 200,000 tons of freight annually.

Middle East economies have plunged into decline in the years of war since the Arab Spring, creating daunting economic and development challenges, according to an IMF report released Friday.

World oil prices fell Friday as the prospects of higher output from Libya and Nigeria further fueled oversupply concerns, cutting short a nascent rebound.

Russia's central bank on Friday cut its key interest rate by half a percentage point to 10 percent, the first reduction since June as Moscow seeks to jump-start its battered economy.

The bank said in a statement that the decision, expected by analysts, was due to a "decrease in inflation expectations and unstable economic activity", but noted it intends now to hold off on another cut until early next year at the earliest.

Ukraine has launched a dispute before the World Trade Organization, complaining that Russian restrictions on road and rail transit of Ukrainian goods violate international trade agreements, sources close to the WTO said Thursday.

Ukraine alleged that Moscow had imposed a range of restrictions on the transit of goods from the country, including banning the transit of any goods with tariff rates above zero, and all goods under the embargo imposed by Russia in August 2014.

Taiwan regulators have ordered the removal of executives of a local bank linked to the Panama Papers scandal and barred it from opening overseas branches, saying not enough was done to prevent money laundering.

Oil prices edged up after tanking the previous day but the gains were limited following fresh US stockpiles data and the prospect of a boost in Libyan output.

Both main contracts tumbled almost three percent Wednesday after the US Energy Information Administration said gasoline and distilled products inventories rose last week, dampening news of a surprise fall in crude supplies. 

Badly conceived and economically wrong, the euro is at the heart of most of the eurozone's problems such as stagnation, unemployment and the rise of the far-right, Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told AFP Wednesday. 

Lending by Chinese banks more than doubled month-on-month in August, reversing from a sharp fall in July, the central bank said Wednesday, another sign of stabilization in the world's second-largest economy.

New loans extended by banks jumped to 948.7 billion yuan ($141.8 billion) last month, up from the 463.6 billion yuan in July, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) said.

Asian markets mostly fell on Wednesday as uncertainty over the future of central bank monetary policy weighed on buying interest while warnings of an extended oil glut sank energy firms.

The region's traders were given a rocky lead from Wall Street where all three main indexes ended more than one percent lower as a plunge in crude prices shredded already tender nerves.