经济学人Italy’s economyDec 8th 2012
考研英语：8月6日《经济学人》选读
考研英语：8月6日《经济学人》选读Italy's illegal immigrants意大利非法移民Tidal wave海啸More horrific deaths in the Mediterranean地中海发生耸人听闻的惨案FEW images of immigrant traffic across the Mediterranean have been as harrowing. Italian TV viewers this week saw the lifeless bodies of 45 African men being lifted, like animal carcasses, from the hold of a fishing boat in which they had tried to reach Europe. Others on the vessel said the men begged to be let out but, for fear of it capsizing, they were forcibly kept below and suffocated.每次发生在地中海的移民惨案都令人异常痛心。
这周，意大利电视台播报了一组新闻。
54个非洲人乘坐一艘渔船想前往欧洲，却不想在船上命丧黄泉。
船上的人说这些人祈求将他们放出来，但是为了防止船只颠覆，他们被关在舱底窒息而死。
Around 5,000 people were picked up by patrol boats on June 28th-29th, the busiest weekend of the year so far. On July 2nd another 70 migrants were reported lost at sea in a separate incident. All this comes after Italy began a search-and-rescue effort called Operation Mare Nostrum, in response to the tragedy last October in which 360 people drowned off Lampedusa, an island half-way between Sicily and the North African coast. On July 1st the police arrested five Eritreans who prosecutors said were part of a ring, with bases in Sudan, Libya and Italy, that arranged the latest ill-fated journey. In a wiretapped phone call, one was heard disowning responsibility for their deaths because “it was their fate”.6月28、29日两天，巡逻船逮捕了大约5000人，这是今年截至目前最忙碌的一周。
[2012.08.11]经济学人
![[2012.08.11]经济学人](https://img.taocdn.com/s3/m/faed9cdd360cba1aa811daa0.png)
导读】中国经济进一步发展，其人口老龄化程度也越来越深。
中国社保制度应当如何解决老年人的养老金问题呢？Pensions养老金Fulfilling promises兑现承诺China is beginning to face up to its pension problems中国开始直面养老金难题Aug 11th 2012 | HEIJINGYING | from the print editionIN THIS village in the cornfields outside Beijing, a 74-year-old woman whiles away the time in the forecourt of a local eatery, chatting to the owner stacking chairs around her. She can enjoy an unhurried retirement thanks to the money her daughter sends, the monthly pension her husband collects from his former employer, and, in the past few years, a small pension, now worth 275 yuan ($44) a month, from the Beijing municipal government.北京城外这座村庄的麦田旁，在当地餐馆前的空地上，有一位74岁的老妇人和身边正在堆放椅子的店主闲谈，借此消磨时间。
她能享受退休后的悠闲生活，多亏了她女儿寄来的钱和她丈夫从以前老板那里按月领取的退休金。
在刚过去的几年里，还多亏了北京市政府发放的一小笔养老金，如今为每月275元（合44美元）。
Public pensions are fairly new to China‟s countryside. Security in old age used to mean the family farming plot, not a pension pot. But by the end of last year 326m rural residents had been enrolled in a public pension, according to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security. That is an increase of over 240m since 2009, when China rolled out a new rural programme, based on pilot schemes in places like Heijingying. This wave of rural Chinese joins nearly 300m city dwellers enrolled in a variety of urban pensions. Add them all up, and China‟s social-security system is now “basically” in place, the National Audit Office (NAO) has just said.公共养老金对中国农村来说还是相当新鲜的概念。
《2013经济学人》6月版双语
欧洲面临的另一个危机经济衰退使欧洲短暂的生育高潮骤然停止Jun30th2012|VIENNA|from the print edition欧洲所面临的危机其实质远比看起来要糟糕。
好像是混乱的金融市场与衰退的经济给这个大陆带来的负担还不够重似的，欧洲生育率在走了长达十年（几乎被忽视）的上坡路后又骤然停止了。
到目前为止，今年已提交数据的15个国家中有11个国家2011年的人口出生率下降（生育率指一个妇女一生中的平均生育子女数）。
生育率跌幅最大国家中有一些就是受欧元危机打击最严重的国家。
西班牙的生育率从2008年的1.46下降到了2011年的1.38。
拉脱维亚的生育率则从1.44降到了1.20以下。
维也纳人口统计学协会的托马斯•索博特卡指出，这些国家前十年的生育率上升被三年的下降抵消。
一些北欧国家虽然并未出现激增的失业率，也未大幅削减政府开支，但生育率跌幅仍然很大。
2010年至2011年间，挪威的生育率从1.95下降到了1.88，丹麦则从1.88下降到了1.76。
但是，无论是像英国那样有着高生育率的国家还是如匈牙利一般生育率低下的国家，这些国家的生育率所呈现的趋势如出一辙：受经济危机影响，生育率在上升了十年之后，于2008年前后停止上升，并从2011年起下滑（见图1）。
从市场角度看，三年是一段很长的时间；从人口统计学角度看，三年不过是一眨眼的功夫。
一件事的发生对人们的影响和造成的改变至少需要九个月的时间（怀胎期）才能体现在出生率上。
在人口统计上也是如此，影响会滞后一年左右才体现出来。
在经济衰退开始之后如此短暂的时间里能看到出生率的变化趋势是很惊人的。
但是，尽管经济萧条与家庭组成存在联系，但这种联系的本质存在争议。
亚当•斯密认为经济的不确定性对生育率的提升有着消极的影响。
但也有人认为经济衰退会降低生育孩子的机会成本，鼓励妇女在失业期间生育本来就打算要的孩子，从而提高出生率。
欧洲最近的经历印证了亚当•斯密的观点。
《The Economist》《经济学人》中文版2009年12月
全国气候：政治搭台，科学唱戏Climate change 气候变化heated debate 激辩Nov 26th 2009From The Economist print editionWhy political orthodoxy must not silence scientific argument为何有了政治说法，还应有科学的辩论？Illustration by Claudio Munoz“WHAT is truth?” That was Pontius Pilate’s answer to Jesus’s assertion that “Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice.” It sounds suspiciously like the modern argument over climate change.“真理是什么？”耶稣说完“相信真理的人都能听到我”之后，彼拉多随即如此问道。
听起来耳熟？在当代，气候变化引起的争辩就与此有相似之处。
A majority of the world’s climate sc ientists have convinced themselves, and also a lot of laymen, some of whom have political power, that the Earth’s climate is changing; that the change, from humanity’s point of view, is for the worse; and that the cause is human activity, in the form of excessive emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.国际上，大多数气候科学家不但说服了自己，也说服了很多门外汉（其中包括一些有政治影响力的人）--地球的气候正在改变；这种改变，从人道主义角度来看，是消极的；这种改变的始作俑者是人类，是他们通过排放超量的诸如二氧化碳的温室气体而造成的。
《经济学人》杂志原版英文(整理完整版)之欧阳学创编
Digest Of The. Economist.2006(6-7)Hard to digestA wealth of genetic information is to be found in the human gutBACTERIA, like people, can be divided into friend and foe. Inspired by evidence that the friendly sort may help with a range of ailments, many people consume bacteria in the form of yogurts and dietary supplements. Such a smattering of artificial additions, however, represents but a drop in the ocean. There are at least 800 types of bacteria living in the human gut. And research by Steven Gill of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, and his colleagues, published in this week's Science, suggests that the collective genome of these organisms is so large that it contains 100 times as many genes as the human genome itself.Dr Gill and his team were able to come to this conclusion by extracting bacterial DNA from the faeces of two volunteers. Because of the complexity of the samples, they were not able to reconstruct the entire genomes of each of the gut bacteria,just the individual genes. But that allowed them to make an estimate of numbers.What all these bacteria are doing is tricky to identify—the bacteria themselves are difficult to cultivate. So the researchers guessed at what they might be up to by comparing the genes they discovered with published databases of genes whose functions are already known.This comparison helped Dr Gill identify for the first time the probable enzymatic processes by which bacteria help humans to digest the complex carbohydrates in plants. The bacteria also contain a plentiful supply of genes involved in the synthesis of chemicals essential to human life—including two B vitamins and certain essential amino acids—although the team merely showed that these metabolic pathways exist rather than proving that they are used. Nevertheless, the pathways they found leave humans looking more like ruminants: animals such as goats and sheep that use bacteria to break down otherwise indigestible matter in the plants they eat.The broader conclusion Dr Gill draws is that people are superorganisms whose metabolism represents an amalgamation of human and microbial attributes. The notionof a superorganism has emerged before, as researchers in otherfields have come to view humans as having a diverse internal ecosystem. This, suggest some, will be crucial to the successof personalised medicine, as different people will have different responses to drugs, depending on their microbial flora. Accordingly, the next step, says Dr Gill, is to see how microbial populations vary between people of different ages, backgrounds and diets.Another area of research is the process by which these helpful bacteria first colonise the digestive tract. Babies acquire their gut flora as they pass down the birth canal and take a gene-filled gulp of their mother's vaginal and faecal flora. It might not be the most delicious of first meals, but it could well be an important one.Zapping the bluesThe rebirth of electric-shock treatmentELECTRICITY has long been used to treat medical disorders. As early as the second century AD, Galen, a Greek physician, recommended the use of electric eels for treating headaches and facial pain. In the 1930s Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini, two Italian psychiatrists, used electroconvulsive therapy to treat schizophrenia. These days, such rigorous techniques are practised less widely. But researchers are still investigatinghow a gentler electric therapy appears to treat depression.Vagus-nerve stimulation, to give it its proper name, was originally developed to treat severe epilepsy. It requires a pacemaker-like device to be implanted in a patient's chest and wires from it threaded up to the vagus nerve on the left side of his neck. In the normal course of events, this provides an electrical pulse to the vagus nerve for 30 seconds every five minutes.This treatment does not always work, but in some cases where it failed (the number of epileptic seizures experienced by a patient remaining the same), that patient nevertheless reported feeling much better after receiving the implant. This secondary effect led to trials for treating depression and, in 2005, America's Food and Drug Administration approved the therapy for depression that fails to respond to all conventional treatments, including drugs and psychotherapy.Not only does the treatment work, but its effects appear to be long lasting. A study led by Charles Conway of Saint Louis University in Missouri, and presented to a recent meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, has found that 70% of patients who are better after one year stay better after two years as well.The technique builds on a procedure called deep-brain stimulation, in which electrodes are implanted deep into the white matter of patients' brains and used to “reboot” faulty neural circuitry. Such an operation is a big undertaking, requiring a full day of surgery and carrying a risk of the patient suffering a stroke. Only a small number of people have been treated this way. In contrast, the device that stimulates the vagus nerve can be implanted in 45 minutes without a stay in hospital.The trouble is that vagus-nerve stimulation can take a long time to produce its full beneficial effect. According to Dr Conway, scans taken using a technique called positron-emission tomography show significant changes in brain activity starting three months after treatment begins. The changes are similar to the improvements seen in patients who undergo other forms of antidepression treatment. The brain continues to change over the following 21 months. Dr Conway says that patients should be told that the antidepressant effects could be slow in coming.However, Richard Selway of King's College Hospital, London, found that his patients' moods improved just weeks after the implant. Although brain scans are useful indetermining the longevity of the treatment, Mr Selway notes that visible changes in the brain do not necessarily correlate perfectly with changes in mood.Nobody knows why stimulating the vagus nerve improves the mood of depressed patients, but Mr Selway has a theory. He believes that the electrical stimulation causes a region in the brain stem called the locus caeruleus (Latin, ironically, for “blue place”) to flood the brain with norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter implicated in alertness, concentration and motivation—that is, the mood states missing in depressed patients. Whatever the mechanism, for the depressed a therapy that is relatively safe and long lasting is rare cause for cheer. The shape of things to comeHow tomorrow's nuclear power stations will differ from today'sTHE agency in charge of promoting nuclear power in America describes a new generation of reactors that will be “highly economical” with “enhanced safety”, that “minimise wastes” and will prove “proliferation resistant”. No doubt they will bake a mean apple pie, too.Unfortunately, in the world of nuclear energy, fine words are not enough. America got away lightly with its nuclearaccident. When the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania overheated in 1979 very little radiation leaked, and there were no injuries. Europe was not so lucky. The accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 killed dozens immediately and has affected (sometimes fatally) the health of tens of thousands at the least. Even discounting the association of nuclear power with nuclear weaponry, people have good reason to be suspicious of claims that reactors are safe.Yet political interest in nuclear power is reviving across the world, thanks in part to concerns about global warming and energy security. Already, some 441 commercial reactors operate in 31 countries and provide 17% of the planet's electricity, according to America's Department of Energy. Until recently, the talk was of how to retire these reactors gracefully. Now it is of how to extend their lives. In addition, another 32 reactors are being built, mostly in India, China and their neighbours. These new power stations belong to what has been called the third generation of reactors, designs that have been informed by experience and that are considered by their creators to be advanced. But will these new stations really be safer than their predecessors?Clearly, modern designs need to be less accident prone.The most important feature of a safe design is that it “fails safe”. Fo r a reactor, this means that if its control systems stop working it shuts down automatically, safely dissipates the heat produced by the reactions in its core, and stops both the fuel and the radioactive waste produced by nuclear reactions from escaping by keeping them within some sort of containment vessel. Reactors that follow such rules are called “passive”. Most modern designs are passive to some extent and some newer ones are truly so. However, some of the genuinely passive reactors are also likely to be more expensive to run.Nuclear energy is produced by atomic fission. A large atom (usually uranium or plutonium) breaks into two smaller ones, releasing energy and neutrons. The neutrons then trigger further break-ups. And so on. If this “chain reaction” can be controlled, the energy released can be used to boil water, produce steam and drive a turbine that generates electricity. If it runs away, the result is a meltdown and an accident (or, in extreme circumstances, a nuclear explosion—though circumstances are never that extreme in a reactor because the fuel is less fissile than the material in a bomb). In many new designs the neutrons, and thus the chain reaction, are kept under control by passing them through water to slow themdown. (Slow neutrons trigger more break ups than fast ones.) This water is exposed to a pressure of about 150 atmospheres—a pressure that means it remains liquid even at high temperatures. When nuclear reactions warm the water, its density drops, and the neutrons passing through it are no longer slowed enough to trigger further reactions. That negative feedback stabilises the reaction rate.Can business be cool?Why a growing number of firms are taking global warming seriouslyRUPERT MURDOCH is no green activist. But in Pebble Beach later this summer, the annual gathering of executivesof Mr Murdoch's News Corporation—which last year led to a dramatic shift in the media conglomerate's attitude tothe internet—will be addressed by several leading environmentalists, including a vice-president turned climatechangemovie star. Last month BSkyB, a British satellite-television company chaired by Mr Murdoch and run by hisson, James, declared itself “carbon-neutral”, having taken various steps to cut or offset its discharges of carboninto the atmosphere.The army of corporate greens is growing fast. Late lastyear HSBC became the first big bank to announce that itwas carbon-neutral, joining other financial institutions, including Swiss Re, a reinsurer, and Goldman Sachs, aninvestment bank, in waging war on climate-warming gases (of which carbon dioxide is the main culprit). Last yearGeneral Electric (GE), an industrial powerhouse, launched its “Ecomagination” strategy, aiming to cut its output ofgreenhouse gases and to invest heavily in clean (ie, carbon-free) technologies. In October Wal-Mart announced aseries of environmental schemes, including doubling the fuel-efficiency of its fleet of vehicles within a decade.Tesco and Sainsbury, two of Britain's biggest retailers, are competing fiercely to be the greenest. And on June 7thsome leading British bosses lobbied Tony Blair for a more ambitious policy on climate change, even if that involvesharsher regulation.The greening of business is by no means universal, however. Money from Exxon Mobil, Ford and General Motorshelped pay for television advertisements aired recently in America by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, with thedaft slogan “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution; we call it life”. Besides, environmentalist critics say, some firmsa re engaged in superficial “greenwash” to boost the image ofessentially climate-hurting businesses. Take BP, themost prominent corporate advocate of action on climate change, with its “Beyond Petroleum” ad campaign, highprofileinvestments in green energy, and even a “carbon calculator” on its website that helps consumers measuretheir personal “carbon footprint”, or overall emissions of carbon. Yet, critics complain, BP's recent record profits arelargely thanks to sales of huge amounts of carbon-packed oil and gas.On the other hand, some free-market thinkers see the support of firms for regulation of carbon as the latestattempt at “regulatory capture”, by those who stand to profit from new rules. Max Schulz of the ManhattanInstitute, a conservative think tan k, notes darkly that “Enron was into pushing the idea of climate change, becauseit was good for its business”.Others argue that climate change has no more place in corporate boardrooms than do discussions of other partisanpolitical issues, such as Darfur or gay marriage. That criticism, at least, is surely wrong. Most of the corporateconverts say they are acting not out of some vague sense of social responsibility, or even personal angst, butbecause climate change creates real business risks and opportunities—from regulatory compliance to insuringclientson flood plains. And although these concerns vary hugely from one company to the next, few firms can besure of remaining unaffected.Testing timesResearchers are working on ways to reduce the need for animal experiments, but new laws mayincrease the number of experiments neededIN AN ideal world, people would not perform experiments on animals. For the people, they are expensive. For theanimals, they are stressful and often painful.That ideal world, sadly, is still some way away. People need new drugs and vaccines. They want protection fromthe toxicity of chemicals. The search for basic scientific answers goes on. Indeed, the European Commission isforging ahead with proposals that will increase the number of animal experiments carried out in the EuropeanUnion, by requiring toxicity tests on every chemical approved for use within the union's borders in the past 25years.Already, the commission has identified 140,000 chemicals that have not yet been tested. It wants 30,000 of theseto be examined right away, and plans to spend between €4 billion-8 billion ($5 billion-10 billion) doing so. Thenumberof animals used for toxicity testing in Europe will thus, experts reckon, quintuple from just over 1m a yearto about 5m, unless they are saved by some dramatic advances in non-animal testing technology. At the moment,roughly 10% of European animal tests are for general toxicity, 35% for basic research, 45% for drugs andvaccines, and the remaining 10% a varietyof uses such as diagnosing diseases.Animal experimentation will therefore be around for some time yet. But the hunt for substitutes continues, and lastweekend the Middle European Society for Alternative Methods to Animal Testing met in Linz, Austria, to reviewprogress.A good place to start finding alternatives for toxicity tests is the liver—the organ responsible for breaking toxicchemicals down into safer molecules that can then be excreted. Two firms, one large and one small, told themeeting how they were using human liver cells removed incidentally during surgery to test various substances forlong-term toxic effects.PrimeCyte, the small firm, grows its cells in cultures over a few weeks and doses them regularly with the substanceunder investigation. The characteristics of the cells are carefully monitored, to look for changes in theirmicroanatomy.Pfizer,the big firm, also doses its cultures regularly, but rather than studying individual cells in detail, it counts cellnumbers. If the number of cells in a culture changes after a sample is added, that suggests the chemical inquestion is bad for the liver.In principle, these techniques could be applied to any chemical. In practice, drugs (and, in the case of PrimeCyte,food supplements) are top of the list. But that might change if the commission has its way: those 140,000screenings look like a lucrative market, although nobody knows whether the new tests will be ready for use by2009, when the commission proposes that testing should start.Other tissues, too, can be tested independently of animals. Epithelix, a small firm in Geneva, has developed anartificial version of the lining of the lungs. According to Huang Song, one of Epithelix's researchers, the firm'scultured cells have similar microanatomy to those found in natural lung linings, and respond in the same way tovarious chemical messengers. Dr Huang says that they could be used in long-term toxicity tests of airbornechemicals and could also help identify treatments for lung diseases.The immune system can be mimicked and tested, too. ProBioGen, a company based in Berlin, is developinganartificial human lymph node which, it reckons, could have prevented the near-disastrous consequences of a drugtrial held in Britain three months ago, in which (despite the drug having passed animal tests) six men sufferedmultiple organ failure and nearly died. The drug the men were given made their immune systems hyperactive.Such a response would, the firm's scientists reckon, have been identified by their lymph node, which is made fromcells that provoke the immune system into a response. ProBioGen's lymph node could thus work better than animaltesting.Another way of cutting the number of animal experiments would be tochange the way that vaccines are tested, according to CoenraadHendriksen of the Netherlands Vaccine Institute. At the moment, allbatches of vaccine are subject to the same battery of tests. DrHendriksen argues that this is over-rigorous. When new vaccine culturesare made, belt-and-braces tests obviously need to be applied. But if abatch of vaccine is derived from an existing culture, he suggests that itneed be tested only to make sure it is identical to the batch from which itis derived. That would require fewer test animals.All this suggests that though there is still some way to go before drugs,vaccines and other substances can be tested routinely oncells ratherthan live animals, useful progress is being made. What is harder to see ishow the use of animals might be banished from fundamental research.Anger managementTo one emotion, men are more sensitive than womenMEN are notoriously insensitive to the emotional world around them. At least, that is the stereotype peddled by athousand women's magazines. And a study by two researchers at the University of Melbourne, in Australia,confirms that men are, indeed, less sensitive to emotion than women, with one important and suggestiveexception. Men are acutely sensitive to the anger of other men.Mark Williams and Jason Mattingley, whose study has just been published in Current Biology, looked at the way aperson's sex affects his or her response to emotionally charged facial expressions. People from all cultures agreeon what six basic expressions of emotion look like. Whether the face before you is expressing anger, disgust, fear,joy, sadness or surprise seems to be recognised universally—which suggests that the expressions involved areinnate, rather than learned.Dr Williams and Dr Mattingley showed the participants intheir study photographs of these emotional expressions inmixed sets of either four or eight. They asked the participants to look for a particular sort of expression, andmeasured the amount of time it took them to find it. The researchers found, in agreement with previous studies,that both men and women identified angry expressions most quickly. But they also found that anger was morequickly identified on a male face than a female one.Moreover, most participants could find an angry face just as quickly when it was mixed in a group of eightphotographs as when it was part of a group of four. That was in stark contrast to the other five sorts of expression,which took more time to find when they had to be sorted from a larger group. This suggests that something in thebrain is attuned to picking out angry expressions, and that it is especially concerned about angry men. Also, thishighly tuned ability seems more important to males than females, since the two researchers found that men pickedout the angry expressions faster than women did, even though women were usually quicker than men to recognizeevery other sort of facial expression.Dr Williams and Dr Mattingley suspect the reason for this is that being able to spot an angry individual quickly hasasurvival advantage—and, since anger is more likely to turn into lethal violence in men than in women, the abilityto spot angry males quickly is particularly valuable.As to why men are more sensitive to anger than women, it is presumably because they are far more likely to getkilled by it. Most murders involve men killing other men—even today the context of homicide is usually aspontaneous dispute over status or sex.The ability to spot quickly that an alpha male is in a foul mood would thus have great survival value. It would allowthe sharp-witted time to choose appeasement, defence or possibly even pre-emptive attack. And, if it is right, thisstudy also confirms a lesson learned by generations of bar-room tough guys and schoolyard bullies: if you wantattention, get angry. The shareholders' revoltA turning point in relations between company owners and bosses?SOMETHING strange has been happening this year at company annual meetings in America:shareholders have been voting decisively against the recommendations of managers. Until now, mostshareholders have, like so many sheep, routinely voted in accordance with the advice of the peopletheyemploy to run the company. This year managers have already been defeated at some 32 companies,including household names such as Boeing, ExxonMobil and General Motors.This shareholders' revolt has focused entirely on one issue: the method by which members of the boardof directors are elected. Shareholder resolutions on other subjects have mostly been defeated, as usual.The successful resolutions called for directors to be elected by majority voting, instead of by thetraditional method of “plurality”—which in practice meant that only votes cast in favour were counted,and that a single vote for a candidate would be enough to get him elected.Several companies, led by Pfizer, a drug giant, saw defeat looming and pre-emptively adopted a formalmajority-voting policy that was weaker than in the shareholder resolution. This required any director whofailed to secure a majority of votes to tender his resignation to the board, which would then be free todecide whether or not to accept it. Under the shareholder resolution, any candidate failing to secure amajority of the votes cast simply would not be elected. Intriguingly, the shareholder resolution wasdefeated at four-fifths of the firms that adopted a Pfizer-style majority voting rule, whereas itsucceedednearly nine times out of ten at firms retaining the plurality rule.Unfortunately for shareholders, their victories may prove illusory, as the successful resolutions were all“precatory”—meaning that they merely advised management on the course of action preferred byshareholders, but did not force managers to do anything. Several resolutions that tried to imposemajority voting on firms by changing their bylaws failed this year.Even so, wise managers should voluntarily adopt majority voting, according to Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen &Katz, a Wall Street law firm that has generally helped managers resist increases in shareholder power butnow expects majority voting eventually to “become universal”. It advises th at, at the very least,managers should adopt the Pfizer model, if only to avoid becoming the subject of even greater scrutinyfrom corporate-governance activists. Some firms might choose to go further, as Dell and Intel have donethis year, and adopt bylaws requiring majority voting.Shareholders may have been radicalised by the success last year of a lobbying effort by managersagainst a proposal from regulators to make it easier for shareholders to put up candidates in boardelections. It remains to be seen if they willbe back for more in 2007. Certainly, some of the activistshareholders behind this year's resolutions have big plans. Where new voting rules are in place, they plancampaigns to vote out the chairman of the compensation committee at any firm that they think overpaysthe boss. If the 2006 annual meeting was unpleasant for managers, next year's could be far worse.Intangible opportunitiesCompanies are borrowing against their copyrights, trademarks and patentsNOT long ago, the value of companies resided mostly in things you could see and touch. Today it liesincreasingly in intangible assets such as the McDonald's name, the patent for Viagra and the rights toSpiderman. Baruch Lev, a finance professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, puts theimplied value of intangibles on American companies' balance sheets at about $6 trillion, or two-thirds ofthe total. Much of this consists of intellectual property, the collective name for copyrights, trademarksand patents. Increasingly, companies and their clever bankers are using these assets to raise cash.The method of choice is securitisation, the issuing ofbonds based on the various revenues thrown off byintellectual property. Late last month Dunkin' Brands, owner of Dunkin' Donuts, a snack-bar chain, raised$1.7 billion by selling bonds backed by, among other things, the royalties it will receive from itsfranchisees. The three private-equity firms that acquired Dunkin' Brands a few months ago have used thecash to repay the money they borrowed to buy the chain. This is the biggest intellectual-propertysecuritisation by far, says Jordan Yarett of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a law firm that hasworked on many such deals.Securitisations of intellectual property can be based on revenues from copyrights, trademarks (such aslogos) or patents. The best-known copyright deal was the issue in 1997 of $55m-worth of “Bowie Bonds”supported by the future sales of music by David Bowie, a British rock star. Bonds based on the films ofDreamWorks, Marvel comic books and the stories of John Steinbeck have also been sold. As well asDunkin' Brands, several restaurant chains and fashion firms have issued bonds backed by logos andbrands.Intellectual-property deals belong to a class known as operating-asset securitisations. These differ fromstandard securitisations of future revenues, such as bonds backed by thepayments on a 30-yearmortgage or a car loan, in that the borrower has to make his asset work. If investors are to recoup theirmoney, the assets being securitised must be “actively exploited”, says Mr Yarett: DreamWorks mustcontinue to churn out box-office hits.The market for such securitisations is still small. Jay Eisbruck, of Moody's, a rating agency, reckons thataround $10 billion-worth of bonds ar e outstanding. But there is “big potential,” he says, pointing out thatlicensing patented technology generates $100 billion a year and involves thousands of companies.Raising money this way can make sense not only for clever private-equity firms, but also for companieswith low (or no) credit ratings that cannot easily tap the capital markets or with few tangible assets ascollateral for bank loans. Some universities have joined in, too. Yale built a new medical complex withsome of the roughly $100m it raised securitising patent royalties from Zerit, an anti-HIV drug.It may be harder for investors to decide whether such deals are worth their while. They are, after all,highly complex and riskier than standard securitisations. The most obvious risk is that the investorscannot be sure that the assets will yield。
经济学人(The economics)人文类
人声是最佳乐器大问题系列：爱德华·卡尔认为最好的乐器是我们大家都拥有的……From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, May/June 2012最好的乐器我们人人都有，时时携带，那就是人声。
几年之前，在爱尔兰临大西洋的当风海岸上，有几位老农拜访了我家的小屋。
那晚家里有茶有酒，火炉里还有干草在燃烧。
待到深夜屋外又黑又冷之时，一个老农突然开始唱歌。
寂静之中只有他的声音在空气中回荡，高亢且刺耳，悲伤地吟咏着班纳海滩的民谣。
在那样的时刻，歌声变成了我们生命的配乐。
所有一切都始于我们最早听到的音乐——母亲的声音。
在世界各地，每周六在体育场的看台上，每周日在教堂的长椅中，人们合声高唱。
正是人们张嘴歌唱赋予生日、婚礼和葬礼庄重的典礼感。
一旦音乐中混有声音，不管你所喜欢的是卡拉斯还是阿黛尔，抑或是皇后乐队，乐器都变成了陪衬。
声音如同指纹一般在音乐上加入了个性化的标记，且能够带出无尽的变化。
借用口语中的爆破音和摩擦音，人声赋予音乐一层感觉、一种情绪或是一个故事，这个故事可能涉及到一位负心人，也可能讲述着为爱尔兰复活节起义运送枪弹却最终无缘抵达班纳海滩的船只。
几乎所有形式的音乐都带有人声的痕迹。
当你倾听肖邦委婉的序曲时，你所听到的是模仿人声的钢琴。
当你倾听弦乐四重奏时，你所听到的是女高音、女低音、男高音和男低音的合唱。
我的小提琴老师克莱伦斯·梅亚斯克福想要让我理解如何为一首旋律分节时，他并不会用他那架精美的17世纪马吉尼来做示范，相反他会用自己平淡无奇的20世纪声音演唱示范。
歌唱对我们有很大的益处。
集中精神用力歌唱可以赋予头脑和身体活力。
唱歌过程中的呼吸吐气清通我们的气管，可以预防咳嗽和感冒。
大声高歌也可以发泄心中的不平。
为什么不试试这是否有效呢？如果你没有足够的信心加入本地合唱团，那你至少可以在家里无人的情况下，把自己安全地关在浴室里淋个浴，同时张开嘴，深吸一口气，释放一下你自己的灌耳魔音。
经济学人双语版1
Europe's debt crisis欧洲债务危机Spot the pattern看变化模式Jul 5th 2011, 18:55 by R.A. | WASHINGTON2011年7月5日18：55 R.A./华盛顿HERE'S a chart showing the yields on 10-year Greek debt over the past three months. See the pattern?本图显示的是在过去3个月10年期希腊债券的收益率。
变化模式看清楚了吧？There's a spike, followed by a decline, followed by a higher spike, followed by a decline to a higher trough, and so on. European leaders keep taking steps to avert disaster, and each time markets are less assuaged.有个尖峰，接着是下跌，然后又是稍高一些的尖峰，接着跌入一个较高的波谷，如此反复。
欧洲国家的领导人一直在采取措施避免灾难，而每一次市场都没有大的起色。
The latest spike corresponds to the stalemate over the IMF's willingness to continue making bail-out payments without a new, long-term rescue package in place (and the corresponding disagreement over how to rollover Greek debt, plus the drama surrounding the passage of Greece's new austerity plan). The IMF agreed to keep paying, French and German banks seemed willing to sign on to a rollover plan, and Greece got its new austerity programme through parliament. But it wasn't long before trouble kicked up again.最近的尖峰反映了这样一个困境：国际货币基金组织愿意继续救助，但又没有制定出一个长期的一揽子救助计划（同时也反映出如何缓解希腊债务各方存在分歧，以及希腊的新紧缩计划能否通过依然有变数）。
economist（经济学人）精品文章中英对照（合集五篇）
economist（经济学人）精品文章中英对照（合集五篇）第一篇：economist(经济学人)精品文章中英对照Whopper to go 至尊汉堡，打包带走Will Burger King be gobbled up by private equity? 汉堡王是否会被私人股本吞并？Sep 2nd 2010 | NEW YORKSHARES in Burger King(BK)soared on September 1st on reports that the fast-food company was talking to several private-equity firms interested in buying it.How much beef was behind these stories was unclear.But lately the company famous for the slogan “Have It Your Way” has certainly not been having it its own way.There may be arguments about whether BK or McDonald’s serves the best fries, but there is no doubt which is more popular with stockmarket investors: the maker of the Big Mac has supersized its lead in the past two years.有报道披露，快餐企业汉堡王（BK）正在与数个有收购意向的私人股本接洽，9月1日，汉堡王的股值随之飙升。
这些报道究竟有多少真材实料不得而知。
汉堡王的著名口号是“我选我味”，但如今显然它身不由己，心中五味杂陈。
汉堡王和麦当劳哪家薯条最好吃，食客们一直争论不休，但股票投资人更喜欢哪家股票，却一目了然：过去两年里，巨无霸麦当劳一直在扩大自己的优势。
经济学人文章摘录32篇（中英对照）
经济学人文章摘录32篇（中英对照）第一篇：经济学人文章摘录32篇(中英对照)【经济学人】双语阅读：律师事务所标价更高收益更少Business 商业报道Law firms 律师事务所Charging more, getting less 标价更高，收益更少Lawyers' biggest customers are discovering that they can haggle 律师的最大客户们发现他们能与律师还价THERE were groans in big companies' legal departments in the mid-2000s, when the fees of America's priciest lawyers first hit 1,000 an hour.当美国最高的律师酬金达到每小时1000美元，20世纪中期，一些大公司的法律部门里开始抱怨连连。
Such rates have since become common at firms with prestige.自此以后，这样的价格在名企变得普遍。
A survey published this week by the National Law Journal found that they now go as high as 1,800.美国法律期刊刊登的一项调查表明，现在的律师费用已经高达1800美元/时，But the general counsels of large businesses are increasingly finding that they can ignore these extravagant rates, and insist on big discounts.但是那些为大公司效力的法律顾问却逐渐发现，他们忽视高额酬金，并坚持较大折扣。
Price-discounting tends to be associated more with used-car lots than with posh law firms.There was a time when a lawyer could submit his bill and be confident of receiving a cheque for the same amount.价格折扣渐渐常见于二手车交易，并非光鲜的律师律师事务所。
经济学人Privateeffort,commongood
经济学⼈Privateeffort,commongoodThe Democratic conventionPrivate effort, common goodDemocrats and Republicans are now arguing over who can best be trusted with the American DreamSep 8th 2012 | CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA| from the print editionBARACK OBAMA’S Republican challengers have a plan for defeating the president. They want to confront him with a question so weighty that he cannot use his charm, personal popularity or powers of lofty rhetoric to escape from it, namely: is America better off today than it was four years ago, when he took office?For some months Mr Obama and the Democratic Party have struggled to craft a response, seemingly hesitating to run on the president’s record at a time of high unemployment, soaring energy prices and other indicators of tough times for ordinary Americans. Instead, the Democratic campaign has been largely negative, blaming the Republicans for leaving behind a mess when they lost the White House in 2008, and attacking their presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, as an out-of-touch capitalist raider.In this sectionPrivate effort, common goodUrban nationAnd then there was oneThe good old waysVive la révolutionBreathing roomShindig fatigueReprintsRelated topicsPolitical familiesU.S. Democratic Party PoliticsPoliticsPolitical partiesGovernment and politicsThat unimpressive stalemate budged a bit this week, as Democrats gathered in Charlotte in the battleground state of North Carolina from September 4th-6th for their national convention. True, the meeting offered its fair share of cheap shots at Mr Romney (were the Republican candidate Santa Claus, one speaker suggested, he would “fire the reindeer and outsource the elves”). It left questions unanswered about how Mr Obama, in a second term, might tackle America’s looming crisis of debt and public spending. Indeed, too many of the governors, senators, congressmen and union bosses invited to speak seemed to see no crisis at all, as they hailed the importance of continued government spending (or “investment”) on everything from new infrastructure to preserving middle-class jobs.But, more interestingly, leading Democrats attempted a political and philosophical counter-attack, directly tackling arguments unveiled by Republicans at their own convention the week before in Florida. That gathering had heard repeated calls for smaller government, less regulation, lower taxes and an end to what conservative speakers called un-American levels of welfare and redistribution.In Charlotte several speakers, among them a former president, Bill Clinton, the First Lady, Michelle Obama, and a young Hispanic mayor from Texas, Julián Castro, accused today’s Republicans of misrepresenting the American dream, and even their party’s own traditions. Speaker after speaker reached into their country’s mythic past to paint a communitarian vision of American success. The mayor of Minneapolis hailed “pioneer ancestors” who had not settled the prairies alone but in wagon trains. Success in America was a “relay”, not a lone marathon, said Mr Castro. The governor of Colorado declared that western history was not just about “rugged individuals”but communities comingtogether to “raise barns”.Mr Clinton gave a bravura speech that deftly recalled Mr Obama’s nasty primary fight with Mrs Clinton, but turned it into a positive by noting that Mr Obama now pragmatically worked with his former party rival. The 42nd president, who enjoys high approval ratings from a public that remembers his two terms as a time of prosperity, solemnly painted the present-day Republican Party as captured by a hate-filled far-right and living in an “alternative universe” in which all those who have achieved success are “completely self-made”. This he suggested, ignored a centrist case for business and government working together to promote growth and “broadly share prosperity”.For her part, Mrs Obama gave an unusually partisan speech for a First Lady, taking swipes at the privileged background and competence of Mr Romney, which she contrasted with the humble upbringings of her and her husband. More interestingly, she also queried Republican arguments about the individualistic nature of American success.Republicans have spent weeks attacking Mr Obama for a garbled remark in July in which he appeared to say that successful entrepreneurs “didn’t build” their firms—though in truth he was making a more complicated (but still pretty statist) point about the importance of good schools, roads and other public infrastructure. Their convention in T ampa rang to angry cries of “We did build it.”In Charlotte, Mrs Obama attempted to recast that Republican slogan as betraying bad manners and ingratitude. She and the president had been brought up to be grateful and humble and to remember that many people had a hand in their success,“from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean”, she said. She described how her father had hardly missed a day of work despite suffering from multiple sclerosis, and had saved and scrimped to pay that share of his children’s college tuition that was not covered by government grants and student loans. The rebuke to Republicans was there to be heard: this was Mrs Obama asserting that the poor (or less than wealthy) can be just as deserving as the bosses whose hard work was the focus of so much attention at the Republican convention.Yet if the chasm between the two parties is astonishingly wide, the Democratic convention revealed that Mr Obama’s party also suffers from its own internal tensions. Democrats are able to unite around a belief that the government has a role in promoting opportunity and ensuring a “level playing field”. But what that means in practice is less clear, as was demonstrated by the speech that preceded Mr Clinton’s. In that address, Elizabeth Warren, an academic running for the Senate in Massachusetts, described the American economic system as “rigged”against small businessmen and workers and evoking the era when Theodore Roosevelt, a century ago, had fought against the forces of “corrosive greed”. Mr Clinton preferred to focus on practical measures to educateAmericans for new sorts of jobs, telling an adoring audience bluntly: “The old economy is not coming back.”Diversity’s problemsMr Obama’s fellow Democrats, gathered for a convention, are a far more diverse bunch than their Republican counterparts, whether racially, politically or by age (today’s Republican activist base is remarkably white-skinned and grey-haired). But that diversity poses its own headaches.Explore our interactive guide to the 2012presidential electionTo win in November, Mr Obama must revive the enthusiasm that saw black, Hispanic and young supporters turn out to vote for him in 2008 in record numbers. His convention duly placed huge weight on a rainbow array of policies dear to different segments of his core coalition. Sitting in the hall, it would have been possible to imagine that the bail-out of Michigan’s unionised car industry was the biggest economic story of the past five years, and that allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the armed forces ranked alongside killing Osama bin Laden in terms of military importance.Yet for victory, Mr Obama must also win over a separate group: independents who backed him in 2008, but who are now gravely disappointed by the gap between his promises to transform Washington politics, and a reality that has seen him look like a prisoner of congressional dysfunction and obstructionism.On September 6th the president was due to address just such wavering supporters, in a speech that would have to explain not just how things could be worse with Republicans in the White House, but how a second Obama term would move the country forwards, and preserve its spirit of opportunity.Politicians have lauded America as a land of opportunity in every election in living memory. As it enters its final weeks, the 2012 election campaign is seeing the argument move from rhetoric to something crunchier: a debate about how to balance freedom, fairness, the rights of the individual and the responsibilities of the state. This is, in short, an election about which party can be trusted with the American Dream itself.from the print edition | United States。
2016考研英语：《经济学人》选读
2016考研英语：《经济学人》选读Spain's economy西班牙经济Iberian dawn伊比利亚的黎明The labour market is recovering at last. But it needs further reform.劳动市场最终还是复苏了，但是其需要进一步的改革。
THIS was the news the government had been waitingfor. “Spain's labour market has made a 180-degree turn,”crowed the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, as the country announced the first annual rise in employment in six years. The numbers show that unpopular reforms to the malfunctioning labour market are starting to work. But there is plenty left to do.这是政府翘首以待的消息。
“西班牙的劳动力市场已经发生了180度的大转弯”，当西班牙政府宣布这是六年来西班牙首次就业增长时，西班牙总理马里亚诺·拉霍伊对此洋洋自得。
这些数字表明那些不受失灵劳动力市场待见的改革也已经初见成效，但仍有许多东西亟待解决。
In the past year Spain has created 190,000 jobs. The unemployment rate, still one of the highest in the euro zone, fell from 26% to 24.5% (see chart), and the labour force stopped shrinking after six straight quarters of decline.在过去的一年中西班牙国内增加了19万个就业岗位。
经济学人9月精选
最后一项因素，令人民信任的总统大选和国会改选的发生条件尚不存在。因此，国会和总统大选的投票日期很可能因准备不及和行政问题而推迟，包括缺乏资金和选民登记不完整。推迟过久可能引起社会动乱，例如催化更具实力的工会走上街道要求回归宪政统治。社会动乱亦可能因恶化的经济气候而升高，国家民主暨发展委员会最后可能要动用武力对付。
中英对照财经文章1
home中国需求迷惑大宗商品市场中国高铁降速很明智为国际能源署喝彩！温家宝称中国成功遏制通胀业内高管：中国叫停空客巨额订单看不透的中国林业普拉达拟香港上市筹资30亿美元伦敦：中国人来了BrandZ品牌百强榜的编制规则中国需求迷惑大宗商品市场Chinese pullback raises doubts over commoditiesThose who believe the commodities(日用品) bull market has run its course could do worse than cite China. For the world’s biggest buyer of everything from cotton to iron ore, it has been an unusually quiet year. Imports of some raw materials have actually fallen, confounding expectations that strong demand would drive prices even higher.那些认为大宗商品牛市已然结束的人，很难再找到比中国更合适的例子了。
从棉花到铁矿石，中国是几乎所有大宗商品的全球头号买家。
对于中国而言，过去的一年异常平静。
一些原材料的进口实际上有所下降，在那些认为来自中国的强劲需求将进一步推高价格的人看来，这有些出乎预料。
Copper is a good example. Chinese imports of refined copper were down 25 per cent from January to May compared with the same period of last year. Ivan Glasenberg, chief executive of Glencore, the world’s largest commodities trader, neatly铜是一个很好的例子。
《经济学人》英中对照翻译版(考研英语必备)
来源于/wordpress/（The Economist《经济学人》中文版）和/（《The Economist》《经济学人》中文版）11月10, 2008[2008.11.08] 美国大选：无限期望America's election：Great expectationsNO ONE should doubt the magnitude of what Barack Obama achieved this week. When the president-elect was born, in 1961, many states, and not just in the South, had laws on their books that enforced segregation, banned mixed-race unions like that of his parents and restricted voting rights. This week America can claim more credibly that any other western country to have at last become politically colour-blind. Other milestones along the road to civil rights have been passed amid bitterness and bloodshed. This one was marked by joy, white as well as black (see article).相信无人质疑奥巴马于本周取胜的重要意义。
这位新总统出生于1961年，那时美国很多州的法律都要求强化种族分离、禁止像奥巴马父母那样的跨族通婚、限制选举权利；这些不仅限于南部地区，而出现在全国范围内。
意大利经济生活作文英文
意大利经济生活作文英文英文：Italy is a country with a rich and diverse economy. From the fashion industry to the automotive industry, there are many sectors that contribute to the country's GDP. In terms of daily life, Italians value quality over quantity, and this is reflected in their shopping habits. They are willing to spend more money on high-quality products, whether it's food, clothing, or household items.One aspect of Italian economic life that stands out is the importance of family-owned businesses. Many small and medium-sized enterprises in Italy are family-owned and operated, and they play a crucial role in the country's economy. These businesses often have a strong sense of tradition and are deeply rooted in their local communities.Another notable feature of Italian economic life is the prevalence of informal work arrangements. This isparticularly true in the south of Italy, where many people work in the informal economy. This can include everything from street vendors to construction workers who are paid under the table.Despite these challenges, Italy remains a vibrant and dynamic economy. From the bustling markets of Rome to the high-end boutiques of Milan, there is always something new and exciting happening in the world of Italian business.中文：意大利是一个经济丰富多彩的国家。
Italy's economy
Italy’s economyItaly economic overviewThe economy of Italy is the 3rd-largest national economy in the Eurozone, the 8th-largest by nominal GDP in the world,and the 12th-largest by GDP. The country is a founding member of the European Union,the Eurozone, the OECD,the G7 and the G20. Italy is the 8th-largest exporter in the world with $514 billion exported in 2016.The country enjoys a very high standard of living,and has the world’s 8th-highest quality for life.Italy owns the world’s3rd-largest gold reserve,and is the 3rd net contributor to the budget of the European Union.The country is also well known for its influential and innovative business economic sector,an industrious and competitive agricultural sector,and for its creative and high quality automobile, naval, industrial, appliance and fashion design.So Italy is the 2nd-largest manufacturer in Europe behind Germany and the world’s largest wine producer. Italy is the largest market for luxury goods in European (3rd in the world) and the country’s private wealth is one of the largest in the world.The country is divided into a highly-industrialized and developed northern part, where approximately 75% of the nation’s wealth is produced; and a less-developed, more agricultural-depended southern part. As a result, unemployment in the north is lower and per capita income in higher compared to the south.HistoryIn the post-war period,Italy was transformed from an agricultural based economic which had been severely affected by the consequence of the World Wars, into one of the world’s most industrialized nations, and a leading country in world trade and exports. Before the 1980s, most of the Italian state-owned companies were a key drivers of growth. However, in the state sector started to create distortion in the economy. The mismanagement of public spending led to a deterioration of public finances and triggered excessive corruption. In 1999, Italy qualified to adopt the euro and entered the European monetary Union. The Euro was officially introduced into the economy on 1 January 2002. Italy was hit by the financial crisis in 2007. Since then, the economy has underperformed. Later, in December 2011, the government led by Mario Monti introduced 3 EUR 30billion austerity package. While the former package was focused on a reduction of government spending in order to reduce the nation’s budget deficit and public debt, the latter introduced, am ong other measures, a series of tax increases.Despite these important achievements, the country’s economy today suffers from structural and non-structural problems. After strong GDP growth in 1945-1990，the last two decades average annual growth rates were below the EU average with Italy being hit particularly hard by the late -2000s recession. In recent years, Italy’s GDP per capita growth slowly returned time the level of its major partners while its employment rate still lags behind due to a large number of undeclared workers counted among the inactive or the unemployed.Trade structureAgainst the backdrop of a weak domestic demand, the external sector’s performance is crucial for the Italian economy. One of the most important pillars of the economy is the production of high-quality products such as in the machinery, textiles, industrial designs, alimentary and furniture sectors. These products contribute substantially to the country’s exports. However, as a country poor in national resources, its energy and manufacturing sectors are highly dependent on imports. This makes Italy’s external position vulnerable to changes in import prices such as fuel. However, in the last two years, falling imports have helped to turn the balance into positive figures. ExportsSince the country’s manufacturing sector is specialized in high-quality goods, Italy plays an important role in the global market of luxury goods. The country’s main exports are mechanical machinery and equipment, which account for around 24%of to tal exports, as well as motor vehicles and luxury vehicles. Home to some of world’s most famous fashion brands. Italy occupies a special niche in the global market of fashion and clothing. In fact, exports of clothing and footwear account for around 11% of the country’s total exports. Other important exports include electronic equipment and pharmaceutical products.Since 2008, the country has experienced anemic growth in merchandise exports of 1.6% annually. In nominal terms, merchandise exports have gradually outsized imports, which caused the last two years, from 2012 to 2013, to close with a trade balance surplus.ImportsItaly’s main imports are fuels, which account for around 17% of total imports. This is due to the country’s lack of natural resources, which makes it highly dependent on energy imports. Other imports include machinery (14.2%), raw materials (10%) and food (7%)—Italy is a net food importer because the landscape is not suitable fordeveloping agriculture. Since the financial crisis, merchandise imports have expended at a slower rate on average than merchandise exports. In fact, in the last six years merchandise imports have grown a meager 0.4%.Economy policyIn the past seven years, the focal point of the Italian economic policies has been to mitigate the effects of the financial crisis. Two main austerity packages has been introduced since the crisis started in 2007. Both packages aimed at reducing the country’s soaring public the debt and government deficit.Regarding structural reform feel changes have been made over the years. The government has sought to reform public administration and public education in an attempt to improve the competitiveness of its human capital. However, the investment climate remains poor mainly due to its rigid labor laws, high labor cost inefficient public service and the judicial system.韩迪20171033072017MBA-P5。
2012年1月经济学人文章(英汉双语对照)
2012年1月经济学人文章（英汉双语对照）Contents[2012.01.31]Libya bitten, Syria shy一朝被利比亚咬,十年怕叙利亚 (1)[2012.01.28]Ant tribes and mortgage slaves 蚁族与房奴 (2)[2012.01.28]Who goes to the gallows? 谁该上绞架？—公众关注吴英案 (3)[2012.01.28]Black, white and blood red 黑色白色与血色 (5)[2012.01.25]Phew, the Oscars are still irrelevant 奥斯卡奖还是不靠谱 (6)[2012.01.23]Gender & tennis: Coming up short 女网的不足 (8)[2012.01.23]China's labour force 中国的劳动力大军 (10)[2012.01.21]Not quite too late 还不算太晚 (11)[2012.01.21]Guatemala's new president: Quick march 新总统必须加快改革 (13)[2012.01.21]Party of two，二人成双 (15)[2012.01.19]The Nordic cure for a hangover治疗宿醉的北欧疗法 (18)[2012.01.16]IN SEARCH OF SERENDIPITY 寻找偶遇 (19)[2012.01.07]The dangers of demonology 妖魔化的风险 (23)[2012.01.07]A murder that changed Britain 改变英国的凶杀案 (26)[2012.01.07]Dutchmen grounded 搁浅的荷兰人 (29)[2012.01.07]New film: "The Iron Lady” 新电影：《铁娘子》 (33)[2012.01.07]Chinese condoms: Reds in the bed 床上的红色安全套 (34)[2012.01.05]A World of Mist 照片散文－雾的世界 (36)[2012.01.02]Take five 目标：攻克五种癌症 (40)[2012.01.31]Libya bitten, Syria shy一朝被利比亚咬,十年怕叙利亚Syria and the UN叙利亚和联合国Libya bitten, Syria shy一朝被利比亚咬，十年怕叙利亚Jan 31st 2012, 20:59 by R.L.G. | NEW YORKIN 2005 all the world's countries signed up, in theory, to a new norm called the "responsibility to protect". In short, the idea is that a government is sovereign because it protects its people. When it cannot do so—or worse, is the perpetrator of mass violence against its own—the responsibility to protect them may devolve to the international community. For a while, this norm was mostly airy, referred to when other countries or United Nations diplomats got involved to stop violence in its earliest phases. But some construe the "responsibility to protect" as a mandate for "liberal interventionism": the right of outside countries to step in militarily when abuses get serious enough. 2005全世界所有的国家从理论上签订了一种新的国际规则，名曰“保护责任”。
《经济学人》ECO名人-人就一辈子100篇(中英版)41-50
TEXT 41The bane of Italy祸起意大利（陈继龙编译）Jun 29th 2006From The Economist print editionALEXANDER STILLE'S new book on Silvio Berlusconi, the flamboyant[1] former I talian prime minister, is neither a b________① nor a work of investigative journalism. Its real value is that it represents the firstattempt,in English at least, to recount in a readable fashion the story, not of Mr Berlusconi himself, but ofBerlusconi-ism.（1）That gives it a wide appeal, for, as its author argues persuasively, Berlusconi-ism is the extrapolation[2] to grotesque[3] extremes of a phenomenon that has gradually, and all too imperceptibly, become widespread.亚历山大·斯蒂莱的新作写的是个性张扬的意大利前任总理西尔维奥·贝鲁斯科尼，但它并非是一本传记，也不是新闻调查作品。
其真正的价值在于，它首次尝试以一种可读性较强的风格，记述了“贝鲁斯科尼主义”而不是贝鲁斯科尼的生平。
这也是本书独具魅力之所在，因为诚如作者很有说服力地论证的那样，“贝鲁斯科尼主义”是对某种现象怪诞至极时的推论，这种现象日趋普遍而所有人却都浑然不觉。
3.31《经济学人》
The Economist explainsWhy does Easter move around so much?∙Mar 28th 2013, 0:03 by T.S.∙TweetTHIS year Easter falls on March 31st for adherents to the various branches of Western Christianity, and on May 5th for Eastern Christianity. In both cases the date of Easter can vary by more than a month, falling between March 22nd and April 25th for the Western church, and between April 4th and May 8th for the Eastern church. This in turn determines the dates of public holidays, school holidays and the timings of school terms in many countries. Why does Easter move around so much?According to the Bible, Jesus held the Last Supper with his disciples on the night of the Jewish festival of Passover, died the next day (Good Friday) and rose again on the third day (the following Sunday). The beginning of Passover is determined by the first full moon after the vernal equinox, which can occur on any day of the week. To ensure that Easter occurs on a Sunday, the Council of Nicaea therefore ruled in 325AD that Easter would be celebrated on the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. But there’s a twist: if the full moon falls on a Sunday, then Passover begins on a Sunday, so Easter is then delayed by a week to ensure that it still occurs after Passover. To confuse matters further, the council fixed the date of the vernal equinox at March 21st, the date on which it occurred in 325AD (though it now occurs on March 20th), and introduced a set of tables to define when the full moon occurs that do not quite align with the actual astronomical full moon (which means that, in practice, Easter can actually occur before Passover).The earliest possible date for Easter occurs when the notional full moon falls on March 21st itself, in a year in which March 21st falls on a Saturday. Easter is then celebrated on Sunday March 22nd, a rare event that last happened in 1818 and will next take place in 2285. The latest possible date for Easter occurs when there is a full moon on March 20th, so that the first full moon after March 21st falls a lunar month or 29 days later, on April 18th. If April 18th falls on a Sunday, then the special Sunday rule applies, and Easter is celebrated the following Sunday, or April 25th. This last happened in 1943, and will next happen in 2038. There is therefore a 35-day window in which Easter can fall, depending on the timing of the full moon relative to March 21st. Eastern Christianity applies the same basic rule but uses the older Julian calendar, which is currently 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar, giving a different range of possible dates. This can pose problems.There have been various proposals to change the way the date of Easter is calculated. At a meeting held in Aleppo in 1997, representatives of several churches proposed that a new system be adopted from 2001, relying on actual astronomical observations rather than tables to define the dates of the vernal equinox and the full moon. This would have ensured that Easter occurred on the same day for both branches of the church. But the proposal was not adopted. In 1928 Britain’s parliament passed a law, which has not been implemented, that would define Easter as the Sunday after the second Saturday in April. Another proposal would define Easter as the second Sunday in April. Several churches, including the Catholic church, say they are open to the idea of setting the date of Easter in this way, so that its date varies by no more than a week. But until there is widespreadagreement, its date will continue to jump around within a five-week window.EgyptIt’s the politics, stupidThe economy faces collapse. A broader-based government is needed to take tough decisions Mar 30th 2013|From the print editionTHE first year after the fall of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 was messy but hopeful.After 30 years of dictatorship, elections brought to power the Muslim Brotherhood,who—although they had suffered decades of persecution—promised to be inclusive andtolerant. But since the Brothers’ Muhammad Morsi became president at the end of Junelast year, politics has become steadily nastier. Egyptian society is ever more polarised.Protests frequently turn violent. The security forces oscillate between support for theIslamists and deep-seated suspicion of them. All the while Egypt’s economy is slidingtowards disaster (see article). Unless Mr Morsi takes drastic steps soon, it could crash. Ifthat happens, Egypt could succumb to lasting turmoil.Virtually every economic indicator points to trouble. The currency has slid by 10% sinceJanuary. Unemployment may be as high as 20%. The stock exchange this year hasslumped by a tenth. Tourism, which used to account for 12% of Egypt’s GDP, hasevaporated. Foreign investment has dried up. Foreign reserves have shrunk. Many ofEgypt’s most dynamic businessmen have fled, fearing they will be arraigned for complicitywith Mr Mubarak. The government is threatening to reverse a number of privatisations.Meanwhile, the price of food is soaring at a time when the average family already spends almost half its income to feed itself. A good quarter of Egypt’s 83m people live below the poverty line.In this sectionHeathrow: our solutionCan India become a great power?This septic isleIt’s the politics, stupidApocalypse perhaps a little laterReprintsRelated topicsMuhammad MorsiEgyptThe IMF has promised to lend $4.8 billion and an array of foreign banks and investors say they will pile in after a deal with the fund is clinched. But first the government will have to embark on tough but essential reforms—tackling the country’s wasteful system of food and fuel subsidies, which gobble up some $20 billion year. Diesel alone, which powers the pumps irrigating Egypt’s farms, accounts for $7.5 billion in subsidies and is sold to consumers at the equivalent of 16 cents a litre, whereas most Europeans pay $2 or more. Queues for fuel in some towns stretch for more than a mile.Short of money, short of timeTerrified that its already falling popularity will plunge further, the government has done almost nothing to stop the drift. It has promised to reduce and target subsidies while protecting the poorest, but so far has trimmed only around the edges, for instance by raising fuel prices for some industries. It says it may make drivers of cars with big engines pay closer to the real price. It is also said to be poised to double import duties on a range of luxury goods. And it has implored rich Arab countries, notably Saudi Arabia and Qatarbut now, more surprisingly, Libya and Iraq, to offer financial support out of compassion for fellow Muslims.Sharper cuts in subsidies are needed, but they would be wildly unpopular, and the government has neither the will nor the authority to implement them. An election scheduled for April has been postponed, probably until August at the earliest. If Egypt is lucky, the vote will produce a government with a stronger mandate, but the country must not continue to drift until then.Egypt needs a government that can take some difficult decisions swiftly. To that end, Mr Morsi should select a fresh team of ministers from a much wider ideological spectrum, including technocrats and secular-minded people as well as his own Islamist brethren. Together they might share the opprobrium that will inevitably result from the measures needed to do a deal with the IMF and get the economy working. Without people willing to put their country before themselves, Egypt faces economic collapse.。
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Italy’s economyMonti’s medicineMario Monti has restored Italy’s credibility but much more must be done to restore its fortunesDec 8th 2012 | ROME| from the print editionAN ABIDING image of Italian cinema is the statue of Christ dangling from a helicopter above Rome on its way to St Peter’s Square, in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita”. It is just over a year since the political equivalent occurred, when Mario Monti was winched into the Chigi palace, the prime minister’s official residence, to replace the lamentable Silvio Berlusconi as foreign funds fled the country and bond yields soared. Mr Monti, an unelected economist, called his first reform package “Save Italy”. As the end of his technocratic government nears—an election is due to be held in the spring—how has he done?In this section»Monti’s medicineJust a phase I was going throughAccountableDIY capitalHappy now?The cult of EquityHeated debateCorrection: Spanish banksReprintsRelated topicsBusinessEU economyEuropean economyEconomiesEuropeMr Monti’s government wins more plaudits from the markets than the public, which may be the right way round for a country with the highest ratio of sovereign debt to GDP in Europe, bar Greece, and the biggest absolute debt pile anywhere bar America,Japan and Germany. Helped by the actions of Mario Draghi, who became boss of the European Central Bank just days before Mr Monti took over, Italian ten-year bond yields have fallen to a two-year low. The Italian electorate is less grateful. Confidence in the government has ebbed away (see chart 1).A loss of popularity was inevitable. The very point of a non-partisan government was to go where elected ministers feared to tread. Thanks to Mr Monti’s doses of austerity—and to the malaise affecting the euro zone as a whole—the economy, in recession since mid-2011, is forecast by the European Commission to shrink by 2.3% this year and by a further 0.5% in 2013. The overall unemployment rate has jumped from 8.8% a year ago to 11.1% (still below the euro-zone average); for young people, it is a desperate 36.5% (well above it).The pain has yielded some gain. The European Commission expects Italy to have a primary budget surplus (ie, before interest payments) of 3.5% of GDP next year. Provided bond yields remain under control and modest growth returns from the middle of next year, that should be sufficient for debt to start edging down from a peak in 2013 of 127.6% of GDP. Vittorio Grilli, the economy and finance minister, thinks that debt could fall by as much as four percentage points a year by the middle of the decade, if the proceeds of planned privatisations worth an annual 1% of GDP are also used to pay it down.That sounds optimistic. It took Italy more than a decade to lower its debt-to-GDP ratio from an earlier peak of 121% in the mid-1990s to 103% in 2007, and conditions were far more favourable then. The severity of the recession has taken Mr Monti by surprise, and a big concern is that GDP may be weaker next year than expected. The economy is suffering a financial squeeze as well as a fiscal one, with credit to firms falling at an annual rate of 3% and interest rates on new loans still well above the euro-area average.Anaemic growth has long been Italy’s big problem. Indeed, in some other respects the country is in a position of strength. Its government may owe a lot but its households and businesses do not by international standards. Italy’s foreign liabilities do not exceed its foreign assets by much: the gap is about 20% of GDP compared with about 100% for Ireland, Portugal and Spain. Italian banks are under pressure but on the whole they have been cautiously managed.Growth is a different story. A combination of lacklustre productivity and continuing wage increases has pushed up unit labour costs, resulting in a loss of competitiveness against Germany in particular (see chart 2)—and also against other southern European economies, where they have been falling recently. Italy was once extolled for its clusters of little firms, but small is no longer beautiful now that competition from low-cost Asian producers has intensified. The country has too few global champions.That’s why a vital part of Mr Monti’s agenda has been “structural reforms”, jargon for policies designed to ginger up the economy by making both labour and product markets work better. Estimates from the IMF suggest that a feasible set of structural reforms could by itself lift the level of GDP by almost 6% over five years.Italy’s failure to exploit its labour resources is apparent in an employment rate among 15- to 64-year-olds of just 57% in 2011, the second-lowest in the euro area and far below Germany’s 73%. That reflects early retirement, low female participation and a dual labour market, in which long-standing employees are virtually impossible to sack and newcomers—called the precari because of their precarious grip on work—have to take one temporary job after another.Mr Monti has made some changes. A pension reform which was part of the “Save Italy” programme will help by extending working lives. It clamps down on early retirement and switches all workers into the contribution-based state pension first introduced in 1995, which makes it worthwhile for people to work longer. Elsa Fornero, the labour minister, acknowledges that the reform has hurt many workers, especially women in their late 50s, but says it was vital to restore fiscal sustainability and “generational equity” to pensions. It will contribute annual savings that will reach 1.2% of GDP in the 2020s.Another reason for low employment is that businesses are reluctant to hire because workers are hard to fire. Employers have long faced heavy penalties, reinstatement ofsacked workers and lengthy legal delays under cases brought to labour courts. Mr Monti’s government tried to sweep this regime away earlier this year but had in April to concede that judges could after all reinstate staff if they found that the economic grounds for dismissal were manifestly lacking. Even so, the reform will help employers by capping redundancy payments to two years.Overhauling product markets is even more vital. The IMF’s research ascribes abo ut four-fifths of that potential 6% gain in GDP to these reforms. Italy has not just a dual workforce but also a dual economy in which cosy domestic monopolies impose high charges on the trading sector. Electricity prices are among the highest in Europe. Professions like pharmacists and notaries enjoy fat profit margins.The government’s attempts to deal with these distortions have again met with only partial success. It has forced ENI, a partially state-owned energy group, to hive off the gas network it controls. This may bring down electricity prices since much is generated from gas. But the grid has not really been privatised, since ENI has sold a 30% stake in it to a state lender. Professions have been shaken up by the abolition of minimum fees and measures to encourage new entrants. But determined lobbying watered down the original proposals by, for example, reducing the number of new pharmacy licences.The overall verdict on Mr Monti’s reforms is that they are a step in the right direction but there is a long way still to travel. Recently published rankings from the World Bank for the ease of doing business in 2012 put Italy among the worst in Europe. Among 185 countries, it came 73rd; on civil justice (ie, enforcing contracts) it ranked an astonishing 160th.Many worry whether Mr Monti’s reforms will be properly implemented. And there is still so much to do, says Guido Tabellini of Bocconi University in Milan: cutting through the tangles of bureaucracy, for instance, or improving the efficiency and quality of Italian public services such as schools and universities.Hanging over any assessment of Mr Monti’s legacy is that election early next year, when politicians will probably be back in power. Italy has had technocrats in charge before (notably Lamberto Dini in 1995-96, who pushed through the earlier bold pension reform) but not managed to maintain momentum. It is absolutely crucial for Italy’s future that a new, elected government carries on where Mr Monti left off, says Giovanni Sabatini of the ABI, It aly’s banking association. Without such continuity Italy will struggle to regain la dolce vita.from the print edition | Finance and economics。