Brussels - Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker would agree to remain as head of the so-called Eurogroup when his second and theoretically final term of office runs out at the end of the year, he told a Luxembourg paper Wednesday.

"If all 15 finance ministers unanimously want to prolong my mandate, I won't be able to say no," Juncker told the Luxemburger Wort paper.

Juncker, who is also his country's finance minister, was elected to head the informal group of finance ministers from the countries which use the euro in 2004.

Sydney - Australia's economy is growing at a quarter of the rate of a year ago, sparking fears that a global top performer has joined a slowdown evident in most of the rest of the developed world.

In the three months through the end of June, the gross domestic product (GDP) rose 0.3 per cent, figures from the Bureau of Statistics released Wednesday showed.

It was the slowest GDP growth rate in three years. The culprit was a sharp drop in household consumption, underlined by a 10-per-cent decline in car sales.

Credit growth was the lowest in 20 years with many households hard hit by petrol price increases and trouble keeping up with mortgage payments.

London  - The British government Tuesday introduced measures aimed at reviving an ailing housing market by lowering the threshold at which first-time buyers would be liable to a special tax on property purchases.

For a period of one year, buyers of a property worth up to 175,000 pounds (315,000 dollars) will be exempt from what is known as stamp duty, a 1-per cent levy on the value of homes. Previously, the threshold was set at 250,000 pounds.

The measures are aimed especially at first-time buyers who have been cut out of the housing market as a result of the credit crunch.

Paris - In a sign that the global economic crisis is more protracted than was foreseen, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on Tuesday said that the European and Japanese economies would grow more slowly than had been forecast.

Eurozone countries will see their economies grow by only 1.2 per cent in 2008, instead of the 1.7 per cent the OECD had predicted previously. Japan's GDP will expand by only 1.2 per cent this year, also down from a previous forecast of 1.7 per cent.

However, the US economy appears to be more robust that believed, with GDP seen to grow by 1.8 per cent in 2008, up from 1.2 per cent projected earlier.

Sydney - The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) on