The International Monetary Fund approved a EUR3.3 billion ($4.3 billion) loan tranche to Greece as expected Wednesday, giving the official sign-off to the controversial program, Dow Jones Newswires reported. The IMF had stalled approval for nearly a year as it pushed Europe to restructure the country's debt and pressed Athens for more economic policy changes. The country has taken major steps to cut spending and reduce its deficit, and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said the bailout program is now moving in the right direction.

Ireland’s new Insolvency Service hopes to begin accepting applications from borrowers seeking debt relief in the second quarter of this year, its head Lorcan O’Connor said yesterday, the Irish Times reported. While there is a “large backlog” of potential cases “it may be a number of months down the road” before the bulk emerges, he told a Grant Thornton-organised seminar on the new personal insolvency legislation. Mr O’Connor said there would be a public register which would show who applied to the new service.

Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said Europe’s success in calming debt markets doesn’t alter the fact that the continent is sinking into a deepening labor market crisis, Bloomberg reported. While Europe’s leaders have persuaded bond investors they’re unlikely to suffer defaults, the region now faces deteriorating economic prospects, Stoltenberg said in an interview in Oslo yesterday. Norway is “very glad for the efforts being made by the European Union and the European governments to manage the acute financial crisis they faced,” Stoltenberg said.

The U.K. arm of DVD rental firm Blockbuster BLIAQ +16.67% Wednesday called in administrators to sell or wind down the company after U.S. parent Dish Network Corp. failed to find a buyer, The Wall Street Journal reported. The move marks the third failure of a major British retailer this year and underscores the bleak conditions in U.K. retail as well as the shift away from high-street DVD rentals as consumers increasingly opt to stream movies via the Internet or get discs in the mail. Administrator Deloitte LLP said it was working to find a buyer for all or parts of the business.

Russia's No. 1 telecoms operator MTS said on Wednesday its Uzbek subsidiary had applied for bankruptcy, Reuters reported. The phone operator had been fighting to restore its Uzbek business after a court revoked its license to operate in August as part of dispute involving a criminal case against local MTS managers and a back-tax claim. MTS was ordered to pay $600 million in fines by an Uzbek court in November.

Despite a drumbeat of optimistic forecasts from economists and upbeat statements from various European leaders, the actual news on the economy continues to be grim, with figures released Tuesday showing that Germany, the Continent’s flagship economy, contracted by about 0.5 percent in the final months of last year, the International Herald Tribune reported. Combined with a flurry of disappointing results recently in other major economies, the stumble raised questions about Europe’s ability to escape recession.

There's a glimmer of hope for the euro zone's fourth largest economy, even though the International Monetary Fund expects Spain to remain in recession through much of 2013, Reuters reported in an in-depth report. As domestic demand has slumped, some companies have converted themselves into exporters. Latin American markets have been a prime target for Spanish companies because of their language advantage, and giants such as Telefonica and Banco Santander have increased their exposure there to compensate for problems in their domestic market.

Households continue to save an increasing share of their incomes, new figures show. In the third quarter of last year Irish households saved 16 per cent of total disposable income, according to Central Statistics Office data published yesterday, the Irish Times reported. The new figures, which have been adjusted for seasonal factors by statisticians for the first time, show that the savings rate in the third quarter was the second highest since figures were first compiled in 2002. High savings rates are a feature of economies which have suffered collapsed property prices.

A pent-up demand for bankruptcies in Ireland is expected to clog up the personal insolvency service when it is finally launched at the end of March, the Independent reported. Sources involved in the process say the demand for bankruptcy settlements is already building and dealing with these will take precedence over the other areas of the personal insolvency regime. "We expect to be dealing with bankruptcy cases for the first number of months. There is huge demand in this area, a lot of people waiting for the service to be launched," a source told the Irish Independent.

Greek lawmakers voted late Friday to increase taxes on middle- to high-income earners, self-employed professionals and businesses despite vehement objections by the political opposition and several ruling coalition deputies who said austerity-weary citizens should not be subjected to further pain, the International Herald Tribune reported.