Business Daily

We go right to the cutting edge of food production and glimpse into the future of farming. Farmers are increasingly using artificial intelligence-powered machines to try to maximise their crops and reduce their spiralling costs. We speak to farmers, those behind the AI systems, and hear concerns about the growing use of automation in agriculture. If you'd like to get in touch with the team, our em...

Jennifer Riria grew up in a rural village in Kenya, juggled motherhood and university studies in her late teens, and ended up running one of the biggest microfinance institutions for women in Africa, which allows women to access loans for their businesses. The entrepreneur pioneered giving small loans to women at a time when they were not allowed to get finance. We hear about her story in life and...

Six weeks after the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela appears to be shifting its economic strategy. The government is reopening its crucial oil industry to foreign investment and redirecting oil exports back toward the United States. Presenter Rahul Tandon is joined by producer Gideon Long, who spent five years reporting from Venezuela, to examine the changes introduced since Maduro’s...

Biohackers say they're making their bodies and brains run better by hacking their biology. And it's not just kitchen counter experimentation anymore. There's now an entire industry promising to optimise you with supplements, treatments and increasingly strange gadgets. Are these expensive, unproven “hacks” worth the investment? To get in touch with the team, send an email to businessdaily@bbc.co.u...

Sri Lanka: a country long loved and marketed as a tropical paradise is reeling after Cyclone Ditwah, which hit the island nation last November. The storm left a third of the island in ruins. Hundreds of lives were lost, homes were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. The country's President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has called it the country's worst-ever economic disaster....

Poland’s economy is expected to be the fastest-growing in Europe this year according to the European Union, with the spending power of its average worker on course to overtake that of Japan. So how, three and a half decades after the fall of communism, has it become a case study of capitalism? We hear from some of the country's biggest companies on that increased consumer power, their ambitions to...

In our first edition of Meet the Founders, we meet Luana Lopes Lara, creator of Kalshi, a prediction markets startup that allows users to trade on the outcome of real-world events - from inflation and interest rates to elections and geopolitics. Kalshi drew attention for showing Zohran Mamdani as a favourite in the NYC mayoral race, as prediction markets gain traction as political barometers. But...

As Japanese people prepare to head to the polls, economic concerns are back at the centre of public life. We explore how inflation, wages, demographics and geopolitics are shaping expectations, and whether the country can finally move beyond the "lost decades".To get in touch with the team, send us an email to businessdaily@bbc.co.ukPresenter: Rahul Tandon Producer: David CannBusiness Daily is the...

The Spanish government has announced plans to legalise the status of half a million undocumented migrants. Many arrive with student or tourist visas but overstay and start working on the black market. Migration is a polarising issue in western Europe, so why is Spain keen to hurry up the process of regularisation? One reason is that Spain’s economy has been outstripping its European Union partners...

As governments cut back on how much they spend on global aid, the head of the Gates Foundation Mark Suzman speaks exclusively to Business Daily about how the world’s poorest are being affected. He tells us world governments “should be embarrassed” that the Foundation has overtaken them to become the largest financial backer of the WHO.When governments reduce their air spend, the organisation inevi...

It’s probably the world’s best-known coffee chain but just over a year ago, business wasn’t doing well. Sales had slipped, customers were drifting away and the buzz had gone. Newly-arrived CEO Brian Niccol was handed a tough task: stop the fall and make the coffee shops somewhere people wanted to return to. In an interview with our North America business correspondent Michelle Fleury, he explains...

From the deserts of Tunisia to the boardrooms of global tech giants, we meet Karim Beguir, the mathematician who turned two laptops and 2000 dollars into Africa’s biggest AI firm. We hear how his company, Instadeep, caught the attention of Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and how it helped to track dangerous new variants in the Covid pandemic using large language models. If you'd like to get in touch with...

We lift the curtain on how everyone from toothpaste brands to the United Nations is using science to influence your choices in ways you’re probably not aware of. Behavioural science has even made its way into TV drama. How does it work? And why is it so effective? If you'd like to get in touch with the team, our email address is businessdaily@bbc.co.ukPresented and produced by Rowan BridgeBusiness...

Demand has been surging for copper around the world - from renewable energy projects, to AI data centres, to infrastructure networks. Production, however, has struggled to keep pace, pushing prices close to record highs in late 2025 and early 2026.As the value of the metal has risen, criminals have increasingly targeted copper for theft - stripping it from telephone cables, railway power lines and...

Country music is in the midst of a grand renaissance. The genre - whose popularity was previously confined to the American South - is now climbing the charts, grabbing the attention of Gen Z audiences, and changing the perception of what it means to be a country listener. Streaming of the genre in the US rose by nearly 110% in the five years to 2024. And it’s taking over markets all around the wor...

One of the world’s largest airline groups has told Business Daily that airspace closures, due to war zones, are now forcing substantial rerouting of flights. Lufthansa says the ban on using Russian and Ukrainian airspace is having a measurable cost impact on its long haul network, with typical detours of one to two hours. A recent Conflict Intensity index report shows that areas affected by armed...

When Lew Frankfort joined Coach, it was a family run, wholesale handbag business worth six million dollars. He spent 35 years at the company, from opening the company's first shop to growing the business now valued at over five billion dollars. We find out what led Lew to an unlikely career in fashion and how a chance meeting with a US president sparked his social consciousness. If you'd like to g...

Forty years ago Japan made more than half of the world's semiconductors. Today, it produces just over 10%. But the country has big ambitions to turn that around. We hear from the CEO of a company at the centre of the government's high-stakes gamble to revive its semiconductor industry, and more broadly, its tech power. And we'll learn how the island of Hokkaido is now the site of billions in inves...

When Slovakia was part of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the cars it made were noisy, thirsty and slow by western standards at the time. But when Volkswagen bought the car-maker Skoda, that was the beginning of a major change. Now, Slovakia makes almost a million cars a year and with Volvo opening a factory here in 2027, it’ll be a quarter of a million more. Extraordinary for a country of fi...

In the second of two programmes, we look at Donald Trump's record on the economy one year into his second presidential term. Today, we are asking is the United States still facing a cost of living crunch? Its economy - the largest in the world - is still growing faster than most others and the stock markets are hitting record highs, yet many Americans say they are still struggling to make ends mee...

Twelve months into Donald Trump’s second term as President, we examine what it’s meant for the US workforce. For government workers it has been a year of cuts, sackings and Elon Musk’s now disbanded DOGE - Department of Government Efficiency - group. Some sections of the workforce have felt their rights under attack. Meanwhile, many Republicans feel DOGE has been a success. Has the past year also...

We meet retail turnaround expert Joanna Reynolds, the woman behind the revival of the Folio Society, one of Britain’s oldest publishing houses. Ten years ago, the company was losing money and facing an existential threat from the digital revolution. Joanna explains how she transformed the business from a failing book club to a profitable, employee-owned publisher. If you'd like to get in touch wit...

Festive celebrations at Christmas and New Year often involve increased alcohol consumption in many parts of the world. For some, that’s followed by a decision to take a break from drinking. It's become widely known as Dry January. However, data shows that more people are choosing to reduce their alcohol intake all year round. Alcohol-free drinks only make up about 1% of the total industry, but the...

Outrage has been growing in Iran over the country's struggling economy. Any growth this year or next looks unlikely. Protests starting in the capital have spread around the country, driven by mounting economic pressures, sanctions and rising consumer prices. They've been met with a violent crackdown by the government. More than two thousand people are reported to have been killed since the protest...

The power of the global bond market seems to have grown in recent years, to the extent that it can now dictate government policy and even topple political leaders. How much clout do the debt markets actually have and should they be reined in? Many rich nations are more indebted than they have ever been in modern times, meaning that some are spending more simply on servicing their debt than on scho...