In just a week as Argentina's president, conservative Mauricio Macri has passed drastic economic reforms, drawing praise from foreign investors but angry protests from citizens afraid for their salaries.

The so-called "Macri-economic" shock treatment in Latin America's third-biggest economy saw the peso currency plunge by a third after he scrapped his leftist predecessor's dollar exchange controls.

China, India and Russia will soon speak with a louder voice at the International Monetary Fund.

After years of opposition, the U.S. Congress has dismantled the final barrier to reforms that will give the emerging-market powers more say in the affairs of the 188-nation global crisis lender.

A group of EU member states led by Italy excoriated a German pipeline project with Russia on Friday, tasking the European Commission with probing whether it met Europe's energy rules.

Formally known as Nordstream 2, the pipeline under the Baltic Sea has angered EU diplomats who accuse Germany of selfishly seeking a reliable energy supply route with Vladimir Putin's Russia all while pressuring other countries to back economic sanctions against Moscow over the crisis in Ukraine.

The U.S. House of Representatives Friday approved a $1.1 trillion spending package for 2016 which if passed by the Senate as expected would avert a government shutdown before year-end holidays.

The sprawling bipartisan compromise, which also tightens visa requirements, proposes reforms to the International Monetary Fund and lifts a longstanding ban on U.S. crude oil exports, passed easily by a vote of 316 to 113. 

Ukraine announced on Friday it would not make payment on its $3 billion debt to Russia due this weekend, deepening a row with Moscow which said it would take Kiev to court.

"The Ukranian government is imposing a moratorium on repaying the so-called Russian debt," Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told a government meeting. 

The economic cost of disasters across the world dropped in 2015 to around $85 billion (78 billion euros) from $113 million last year, reinsurance company Swiss Re said on Friday.

Insurance companies covered $32 billion of the total, it said in its Sigma study.

The French economy is forecast to grow at a slower pace in the fourth quarter due mainly to the impact of the deadly Paris attacks last month, the Insee statistics office said Thursday.

Insee revised lower its estimate of economic expansion in the October-through-December period to 0.2 percent, down from the previous forecast of 0.4 percent, following the series of attacks by jihadists that left 130 people dead.

Japan's central bank announced an unexpected round of new stimulus measures Friday to complement its vast asset-buying scheme, pushing the yen down sharply and giving a brief boost to Tokyo share prices.

The move came soon after the Federal Reserve's first interest rate cut in almost a decade and highlights the divergence in monetary policy between the surging United States economy and its rivals.

Syrian refugees who have taken jobs in Turkey are employed almost exclusively on an informal basis in "low-quality, low-paid" work, the U.N. labor agency warned on Thursday.

Hundreds of thousands of the 2.2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey who fled the civil war are in some kind of employment but the International Labor Organization (ILO) warned that their status had to be improved.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed a major natural gas deal Thursday aimed at tapping large deposits in the Mediterranean, but a court challenge was expected over the contentious agreement.

Netanyahu has pushed hard for the framework deal setting out parameters for developing natural gas resources offshore with a consortium that includes U.S. firm Noble Energy.