Friday, July 19, Vilnius - President Dalia Grybauskaitė met with the leaders of BusinessEurope, Emma Marcegaglia and Markus J. Beyrer, to discuss the economic situation in the Old Continent. Eurobusiness is the main business organization in Europe which represents 20 million companies from 35 countries. During their meeting with the President of Lithuania, Emma Marcegaglia and Markus J. Beyrer outlined the key problems and challenges faced by the business community and presented their recommendation to improve business conditions in Europe.

The director of International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde, and the chairman of the board of the European Central Bank Jorg Asmussen started their two day visit in Lithuania.

Compared to May 2012, industrial production output in Latvia increased by 0.6% in May 2013 – the second smallest increase in the European Union, according to the EU's statistical office Eurostat. The steepest increase in industrial production output was registered in Lithuania – 21.6%, followed by Estonia – 6.3%, and Portugal – 4.5%, writes LETA.

State-owned enterprises recorded positive figures in 2012 – their combined net profit was EUR 126.5 million (LTL 436.8 million), more than double growth, according to the report published by the State-Owned Enterprise Governance Coordination Department of the State Property Fund, informs LETA/ELTA.

Fuel from food crops have been pitched as a way to reduce carbon emissions from transport, however questions have been raised about how green these biofuels really are. The EU has supported them for the last 10 years, but last year the Commission proposed to limit the amount of food-based biofuels. We asked Corinne Lepage, a French member of the ALDE group in charge of steering the fuel quality and renewable energy directives through EP, about the challenges posed by biofuels.