The South Pacific island of Samoa has decided to hop forward over the international date line in order to boost its economy, 119 years after it decided to move the other way.
Samoa will switch to the west side of the international date line to make it easier for it to do business with Australia and New Zealand. Samoa is currently 21 hours behind Sydney, but from December 29th it will be three hours ahead.
The original move to the east side of the international date line was to aid trade with the US and Europe. However, Australia and New Zealand have increasingly become Samoa’s biggest trading partners and they believe that they are losing out on two working days a week.