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2018经济学人考研英文文章阅读二

Science and technology:Air pollution:Blown away科技：空气污染：吹走它Retired jet engines could help clear the smog that smothered big cities.退役喷射发动机可以用来驱逐笼罩大城市的雾霾。

To land at Indira Gandhi Airport is to descend from clear skies to brown ones.飞机在英迪拉甘地机场着陆的过程中，天空会由明朗转为棕黄。

Delhi’s air is toxic.德里的空气是有毒的。

According to the World Health Organisation,India’s capital has the most polluted atmosphere of all the world’s big cities.据世界卫生组织报道，印度首都是全世界空气污染最严重的大城市。

The government is trying to introduce rules that will curb emissions—allowing private cars to be driven only on alternate days,for example,and enforcing better emissions standards for all vehicles.政府正努力制定控制排放的条例，比如：私家车单双数出行、强制提高所有车辆的排放标准。

But implementing these ideas,even if that can be done successfully,will change things only slowly.但即使这些方法都能顺利实施，情况也不会立刻好转。

A quick fix would help.速效对策将有所帮助。

经济学人文章(四六级雅思精读素材)2020-08-27

The Economist August 29th 2020 Business 55Depending on whom you ask, Califor-nia is a leader in clean energy or a cau-tionary tale. Power outages in August prompted stern critiques from Republi-cans. “In California”, D onald Trump tweeted, “D emocrats have intentionally implemented rolling blackouts—forcing Americans in the dark.” In addition to pro-voking outrage and derision, however, the episode is also likely to inspire investment.The Golden State has long been Ameri-ca’s main testing ground for green compa-nies. Californians buy half of all electric cars sold in America. Theirs is the country’s largest solar market. As California deals with heat waves, ﬁres and a goal of carbon-free electricity by 2045, the need for a reli-able grid is becoming ever more obvious.For years ﬁrms competed to generate clean power in California. Now a growing num-ber are vying to store and manage it, too. August’s blackouts have many causes,including poor planning, an unexpected lack of capacity and sweltering heat in not just California but nearby states from which it sometimes imports power. Long before the outages, however, electricity op-erators were anxious about capacity. Cali-fornia’s solar panels become less useful in the evening, when demand peaks. In No-vember state regulators mandated that utilities procure an additional 3.3 gigawatts (gw ) of capacity, including giant batteries that charge when energy is abundant and can sell electricity back to the grid.Too few such projects have come online to cope with the surge in demand for air-conditioning in the scorching summer. But more are sprouting across the state. On Au-gust 19th ls Power, an electricity ﬁrm backed by private equity, unveiled a 250-megawatt (mw ) storage project in San Die-go, the largest of its kind in America. In July the county of Monterey said Vistra Energy,a Texan power company, could build as much as 1.2gw of storage.The rooftop solar industry stands to beneﬁt from a new Californian mandate that requires new homes to install panels on their roofs from this year. Sunrun, the market leader, is increasingly pairing such residential installations with batteries. In July, for instance, the company said it had won contracts with energy suppliers in the Bay Area to install 13mw of residential solar and batteries. These could supply power to residents in a blackout or feed power into the grid to help meet peak demand. Sunrunis so conﬁdent in its future that it has bid $3.2bn for Vivint Solar,its main rival.Another way to stave oﬀoutages is to curb demand.Enel,a European power company,has contracts with local utilities to work with large commercial and indus-trial clients.When demand rises,Enel pays customers to reduce energy consumption,easing demand on the grid.A company called OhmConnect oﬀers something sim-ilar for homeowners.Even as such oﬀerings scale up,the need for reliability means that fossil fuels will not disappear just yet.On September 1st California’s regulators will vote on whether to delay the retirement of four natural-gas plants in light of the outages.The state remains intent on decarbonising its power system over the next 25years.But progress may not move in a straight line.7NEW YO RKBusinesses compete to battle California’s blackoutsEnergy utilitiesLitMany big companies may be struggling with depressed sales, but these are busy times for bribery-busters. Mexico is abuzz over allegations by an ex-boss of Pe-mex, the state oil giant, that several senior politicians received bungs from compa-nies including Odebrecht, a Brazilian con-struction ﬁrm (see Americas section). The scandal is the latest in a string of graft cases to make headlines this year, starting with Airbus’s record $4bn settlement in January over accusations of corruption for making illegal payments in various countries.Corporate bribery is hardly new. In sur-veys, between a third and a half of compa-nies typically claim to have lost business to rivals who won contracts by paying kick-backs. But such perceptions-based re-search has obvious limitations. A new study takes a more rigorous approach, and draws some striking conclusions.Raghavendra Rau of Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, Yan-Leung Cheung of the Education University of Hong Kong and Aris Stouraitis of Hong Kong Baptist University examined nearly 200 prominent bribery cases in 60 coun-tries between 1975 and 2015. For the ﬁrms doing the bribing, they found, the short-term gains were juicy: every dollar of bribe translated into a $6-9 increase in excess re-turns, relative to the overall stockmarket. That, however, does not take account of the chances of getting caught. These have risen as enforcement of America’s 43-year-old anti-bribery law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (fcpa ), has been stepped up and other countries have passed similar laws. The number of fcpa cases is up sharply since the ﬁnancial crisis of 2007-09, according to Stanford Law School (see chart). It has dipped a bit under Presi-dent Donald Trump, who has criticised the fcpa for hobbling American ﬁrms over-seas, but remains well above historic lev-els. Total ﬁnes for fcpa violations were $14bn in 2016-19, 48 times as much as in the four years to 2007.The authors also tested 11hypotheses that emerged from past studies of bribery.They found support for some, for instance that ﬁrms pay larger bribes when they ex-pect to receive larger beneﬁts, and that the net beneﬁts of bribing are smaller in places with more public disclosure of politicians’sources of income.But they punctured other bits of re-ceived wisdom. Most striking, they found no link between democracy and graft. This challenges the “Tullock paradox”, which holds that ﬁrms can get away with smaller bribes in democracies because politicians and oﬃcials have less of a lock on the sys-tem than those in autocratic countries, and so cannot extract as much rent. Such ﬁnd-ings will doubtless be of interest to corrup-tion investigators and unscrupulous exec-utives alike. 7Bribery pays—if you don’t get caughtBriberyA closer look at greasy palmsBrown envelopes, big chequesUnited States,Foreign Corrupt Practices ActSources:Stanford Law School;Sullivan &Cromwell*Investigations and enforcement actions †To August6543210605040302010020†10152000059095851977Enforcement actionsSanctions, $bnUtilitiesTransport Communications Basic materials Financial services Consumer goods Aerospace & defence TechnologyIndustrials Health care Oil &gas 100806040200Number of cases* by selected industry1977-2020†。

经济学人精选文章两篇

You are listening to the audio edition of the Economist. Stealing in the Business sectio n.您正在收听《经济学人》音频版。

节选自商业篇。

HTC's patent problemsHTC的专利问题Android alert安卓系统，要当心了Using Google’s Android software has given HTC a boost, but it may now make the Tai wanese handset-makervulnerable to costly lawsuits使用谷歌的安卓软件推动了宏达电（HTC）的发展，但是现在它可能变成弱点，令这家台湾手机制造公司遭遇昂贵的诉讼UNTIL a few years ago HTC was pretty small and relatively obscure. But the Taiwanes e company’s recentgrowth has been remarkable. In the second quarter it sold 11m smart phones, more than doubling its revenues inthe same period last year. HTC’s main rivals, Nokia, Samsung and Apple, still sell around twice as manysmartphones. But its rapid gro wth, especially on Apple’s American home turf, has made it a competitor to reckonwith.几年前HTC还只是一个规模很小、相对不知名的公司。

经济学人精品文章

经济学人精品文章1．世界经济一路泥泞还是一路下滑?夏天已经走近了世界几大金融中心，可人们的心情却阳光不起来。

受各地经济悲观消息影响，股市已经连阴数周。

全球工厂生产放缓，消费者也愈发谨慎。

在美国，从房屋价格到就业增长的几乎每一项统计数据都显示疲软迹象。

虽然本周早些时候悲观气氛有所平缓，但也只是因为如美国零售业和中国工业生产等数据没有预想的那么糟糕而已。

全球范围内，经济增长正处于约两年前复苏开始以来的最低点。

那么现在的疲软只是复苏道路上的一滩泥泞，还是预示了全球经济恢复动力正在消退？大疲软从导致增长停滞的原因来看停顿应该只是暂时的。

首先，虽然这次的海啸重创日本GDP；打断供应链；尤其影响了4月全球工业产出量。

但经济统计数据显示暴跌的同时，一些更具前瞻性的迹象也表明将有一轮反弹。

比如美国汽车制造商的夏季生产计划表显示，那里的年GDP增长将至少提高一个百分点。

第二，是年初突然高企的油价导致了需求下降。

虽然更多的收入正从资金紧张的石油进口国流入坐享其成的产出国。

昂贵的燃油价格也打击了消费者信心，特别是在石油消费大国美国。

而且油价随阿拉伯世界动荡加剧而再度上扬的可能性也令人不安。

然而至少就目前来看，价格上涨的压力正在减弱。

美国的平均汽油价格虽然仍比年初高出21％，但已经开始回落。

这样应该可以促进消费者信心（并刺激消费）。

第三，许多新兴经济体推行货币紧缩政策是为了应对高通胀。

中国今年5月CPI攀升到了5.5％，印度商品批发价格增长也一举跃上9.1％。

以此为鉴，增速放缓在一定程度上倒是一个有利迹象，这恰恰说明这些国家的央行正采取行动，并开始取得成效。

即使是在对经济硬着陆风险忧心最重的中国，也没有迹象表明政府措施有矫枉过正之嫌。

其实更大的风险在于对世界经济疲软的担忧导致紧缩政策过早收兵。

在当前货币环境仍极其宽松的背景下，如果政府决心有所动摇将导致更高的通胀，最终使经济崩溃的风险大大增加。

也许大部分新兴市场正好需要一场减速来降温，但任何一个发达国家此刻却对此避之不及。

《经济学人》文章精选1

Togetherness in LibyaObama’’s awfully big change in AmericaAmerica’’s use Barack Obamaof forceMar31st2011|from the print edition•Tweet•IT IS Pavlovian.As soon as a president does something new in foreign policy,the world wants to know whether he has invented a new “doctrine”.The short answer in the case of Libya is that Barack Obama has not invented a new doctrine so much as repudiated an old one.What he is also doing,however,is challenging an American habit of mind.The doctrine Mr Obama has repudiated is the one attributed to ColinPowell,the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and George W. Bush’s transparently miserable secretary of state when America invaded Iraq in2003.That held,among other things,that America ought to go to war only when its vital interests are threatened,when the exit strategy is clear,and when it can apply overwhelming force to ensure that its aims are achieved.Nothing could be more different from the account Mr Obama gave Americans on March28th of his reasons for using military force in Libya.He does not believe that America’s vital interests are at stake(though some“important”ones are);the exit strategy is not entirely clear(Colonel Qaddafi must go,but who knows when,and not as a direct result of American military action);and the force America is willing to apply(no boots on the ground)is strictly limited.None of this should be a surprise.In“The Audacity of Hope”,the bestseller Mr Obama wrote as a senator in2006,he set out a theory of military intervention.Like all sovereign nations,he argued,America has the unilateral right to defend itself from attack,and to take unilateral military action to eliminate an imminent threat.But beyond matters of clear self-defence,it would“almost always”be in its interest to use force multilaterally.This would not mean giving the UN Security Council a veto over its actions,or rounding up Britain and Togo and doing as it pleased.It would mean following the example of the first President Bush in the first Gulf war—“engaging in the hard diplomatic work of obtainingmost of the world’s support for our actions”.Related topics•United States•Libya•Barack ObamaThe virtue of such an approach was that America had much to gain in a world that lived by rules.By upholding such rules itself,it could encourage others to do so too.A multilateral approach would also lighten America’s burden at times of war.This might be“a bit of an illusion”, given the modest power of most American allies.But in many future conflicts the military operation was likely to cost less than the aftermath: training police,switching the lights back on,building democracy and so forth.The president,it now emerges,remembers exactly what he wrote.He hesitated about whether to act in Libya(just ask the French and British, who egged him on but came close to losing hope),but he was always clear about how.All the conditions he wished for in that book five years ago have come to pass.In this week’s speech he ticked them methodically off:“an international mandate for action,a broad coalition prepared to join us,the support of Arab countries,and a plea for help from the Libyanpeople themselves.We also had the ability to stop Qaddafi’s forces in their tracks without putting American troops on the ground.”Under such circumstances,he said,for America to turn a blind eye to the fate of Benghazi would have been“a betrayal of who we are”.Why does this theory of intervention,and the noble sentiment attached to it,fail to qualify as a“doctrine”?Because it is too elastic to provide a guide to future action.Would America“betray”itself by turning a blind eye to atrocities under different,less favourable,circumstances?So it seems.It has,after all,done so before,in Rwanda and Darfur—and Mr Obama appears to accept that it might have to do so again when,say,an alliance would be damaged,as in Bahrain,or the job is too hot to handle, as in Syria or Iran.Also unclear is whether an American interest must also be at stake before Mr Obama invokes the moral case for action. Conveniently(for the purpose of selling this particular war),the president detects a“strategic interest”in preventing Colonel Qaddafi from chilling the wider Arab spring,so nobody knows.In fairness,elasticity is not a sin;and Mr Obama does not claim to have invented anything he calls a“doctrine”.The worst you can say about his approach is that it is merely commonsensical:decide the issues case-by-case while holding some idea of values and interests in mind. Many who say they want more consistency than this(typically by askingsome variant of“What about Zimbabwe?”)do so not because they really believe that foreign policy can be run by an algorithm but in order to embarrass Mr Obama in any way they can.Prize chump in the case of Libya this past fortnight has been Newt Gingrich,the Republican presidential hopeful who demanded consistency,called for intervention and turned on a dime the instant Mr Obama answered.After you,SarkoMore significant,however,is that habit of mind.In Libya Mr Obama is challenging the assumption of global leadership America has taken for granted ever since the second world war.America has joined coalitions before,but never under a president quite so adamant that America is not in charge—even if the military burden-sharing is indeed a bit of an illusion.Most Republicans and quite a few Democrats hate this.Mr Obama’s hope is that America’s low profile will make the war more palatable not only to the Muslim world but also to the economy-fixated voters at home who question whether America can still afford to play its traditional leadership role.What he may soon discover is that modesty extracts a price of its own.By sharing the leadership with others,he has made his policy hostage to the limited mandate(no use of force for regime change) imposed by the United Nations and the limited means of his allies inEurope and the Middle East.It may not be a doctrine,it should not be a surprise,but nobody can deny that it is a gamble.。

(完整word版)经济学人经济类文章精选4

InadequateSOMETIMES the only thing people can agree on is a mediocre idea. Ahead of the G20 meeting, some regulators are pushing to introduce dynamic provisioning for banks. Under this system, in boom years banks make provisions against profits which then sit on their balance-sheets as reserves against unspecified potential losses. In the bad years they draw down on these reserves. This smooths banks’ profits over the cycle, making their capital positions “counter-cyclical”. Supporters point to Spain, which uses this approach and whose lenders are in relatively good nick.Banks should be encouraged to save more for a rainy day. But the importance of Spain’s system has been oversold. Going into the credit crisis, its two big banks had an extra buffer equivalent to about 1.5% of risk-weighted assets. Banks like UBS or Citigroup have had write-offs far beyond this, equivalent to 8-15% of risk-weighted assets. Whether dynamic provisions influenced managers’ behaviour is also questionable. Spain’s BBV A was run us ing an economic-capital model that, according to its 2007 annual report, explicitly replaced the generic provision in its income statement with its “best estimate of the real risk incurred”.Accounting standard-setters, meanwhile, are not amused. They support the objective of counter-cyclical capital rules but think dynamic provisioning is a bad way to achieve this. Why not simply require banks to run with higher capital ratios, rather than go through a circuitous route by smoothing profits, which investors tend to dislike? Accountants worry their standards are being fiddled with needlessly, after a decades-long fight to have them independently set to provide accurate data to investors.Is there a solution? If anything, the crisis shows that accounting and supervision should be further separated to break the mechanistic link between mark-to-market losses and capital. Investors should get the information they want. Supervisors should make a judgment about the likelihood of losses and set the required capital level accordingly. Warren Buffett, an astute investor, has endorsed this approach.Sadly, bank supervision is as dysfunctional as the banks. The Basel 2 accords took five years to negotiate. Local regulators interpreted them differently and many failed to enforce them. Confidence in their integrity is now so low that many investors and some banks and regulators have abandoned Basel as their main test of capital. Given this mess, it is easy to see why policymakers might view tweaking accounting standards as an attractive short cut: with some arm-twisting, the rules can be changed quickly and are legally enforceable. But this is a matter where short cuts are not good enough.Unsavoury spreadTEN years ago Warren Buffett and Jack Welch were among the most admired businessmen in the world. Emerging markets were seen as risky, to be avoided by the cautious. But now the credit-default swaps market indicates that Berkshire Hathaway, run by Mr Buffett, is more likely to default on its debt than Vietnam. GE Capital, the finance arm of the group formerly run by Mr Welch, is a worse credit risk than Russia and on March 12th Standard & Poor's downgraded its debt—the first time GE and its subsidiaries have lost their AAA rating in over five decades.The contrast highlights the sorry state of the corporate-bond market. A turn-of-the-year rally was founded on hopes that spreads (the excess of corporate-bond yields over risk-free rates) more than compensated investors for the economic outlook. That has now petered out.The weakness has been much greater in speculative, or high-yield, bonds than in theinvestment-grade part of the market. This is hardly surprising. First, economic prospects are so dire that companies already in trouble will have difficulty surviving. Banks are trying to preserve their own capital and do not need to own any more toxic debt. Even if refinancing were available for endangered firms, it would be prohibitively dear. It is only a matter of time before some go under. Moody’s cites 283 companies at greate st risk of default, including well-known outfits like Blockbuster, a video-rental chain, and MGM Mirage, a casino group. A year ago just 157 companies made the list. Standard & Poor’s says 35 have defaulted this year, against 12 in the same period in 2008. That translates into a default rate over the past 12 months of just 3.8%.The rate is likely to increase sharply. Charles Himmelberg, a credit strategist at Goldman Sachs, forecasts that 14% of high-yield bonds will default this year, with the same proportion going phut in 2010. Worse, creditors will get back only about 12.5 cents on the dollar. All told, Goldman thinks the combination of defaults and low recovery rates will cost bondholders 37 cents on the dollar in the next five years.A second problem for the corporate-bond market is that optimism about the scope for an imminent end to the financial crisis has dissipated. “People have given up hope that the new [Obama] administration will be able to do anything to make things better quickly,” says Willem Sels, a credit strategist at Dresdner Kleinwort.Banks are still the subject of heightened concern. Credit Derivatives Research has devised a counterparty-risk index, based on the cost of insuring against default of 15 large banks; the index is now higher than it was after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Jeff Rosenberg, head of credit strategy at Bank of America Securities Merrill Lynch, says investors are uncertain about the impact of government intervention in banks. Each successive rescue, from Bear Stearns to Citigroup, has affected different parts of the capital structure in different ways.A third problem for the high-yield market is that plans for quantitative easing (purchases by the central bank of government and private-sector debt) are focused on investment-grade bonds. As well as reviving the economy, governments are concerned about protecting taxpayers’ money, and so will not want to buy bonds at high risk of default. If the government is going to support the investment-grade market, investors have an incentive to steer their portfolios in that direction.The relative strength of the investment-grade market even permitted the issuance of around $300 billion of bonds in the first two months of the year, albeit largely for companies in safe industries such as pharmaceuticals. Circumstances suited all the market participants. “Spreads were wide, which attracted investors, but absolute levels of interest rates were low, which suited issuers,” says Mr Rosenberg.Although the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped by nearly 6% on March 10th, it is hard to see how the equity market can enjoy a sustained rebound while corporate-bond spreads are still widening. Bondholders have a prior claim on a company’s assets; if they are not going to be paid in full, then shareholders will not get a look-in. However, credit investors say their market often takes its lead from equities. If each is following the other, that hints at a worrying downward spiral.A PlanB for global financeIn a guest article, Dani Rodrik argues for stronger national regulation, not the global sort THE clarion call for a global system of financial regulation can be heard everywhere. From Angela Merkel to Gordon Brown, from Jean-Claude Trichet to Ben Bernanke, from sober economists tocountless newspaper editorials; everyone, it seems, is asking for it regardless of political complexion.That is not surprising, perhaps, in light of the convulsions the world economy is going through. If we have learnt anything from the crisis it is that financial regulation and supervision need to be tightened and their scope broadened. It seems only a small step to the idea that we need much stronger global regulation as well: a global college of regulators, say; a binding code of international conduct; or even an international financial regulator.Yet the logic of global financial regulation is flawed. The world economy will be far more stable and prosperous with a thin veneer of international co-operation superimposed on strong national regulations than with attempts to construct a bold global regulatory and supervisory framework. The risk we run is that pursuing an ambitious goal will detract us from something that is more desirable and more easily attained.One problem with the global strategy is that it presumes we can get leading countries to surrender significant sovereignty to international agencies. It is hard to imagine that America’s Congress would ever sign off on the kind of intrusive international oversight of domestic lending practices that might have prevented the subprime-mortgage meltdown, let alone avert future crises. Nor is it likely that the IMF will be allowed to turn itself into a true global lender of last resort. The far more likely outcome is that the mismatch between the reach of markets and the scope of governance will prevail, leaving global finance as unsafe as ever. That certainly was the outcome the last time we tried an international college of regulators, in the ill-fated case of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.A second problem is that even if the leading nations were to agree, they might end up converging on the wrong set of regulations. This is not just a hypothetical possibility. The Basel process, viewed until recently as the apogee of international financial co-operation, has been compromised by the inadequacies of the bank-capital agreements it has produced. Basel 1 ended up encouraging risky short-term borrowing, whereas Basel 2’s reliance on credit ratings and banks’ own models to generate risk weights for capital requirements is clearly inappropriate in light of recent experience. By neglecting the macro-prudential aspect of regulation—the possibility that individual banks may appear sound while the system as a whole is unsafe—these agreements have, if anything, magnified systemic risks. Given the risk of converging on the wrong solutions yet again, it would be better to let a variety of regulatory models flourish.Who says one size fits all?But the most fundamental objection to global regulation lies elsewhere. Desirable forms of financial regulation differ across countries depending on their preferences and levels of development. Financial regulation entails trade-offs along many dimensions. The more you valuefinancial stability, the more you have to sacrifice financial innovation. The more fine-tuned and complex the regulation, the more you need skilled regulators to implement it. The more widespread the financial-market failures, the larger the potential role of directed credit and state banks. Different n ations will want to sit on different points along their “efficient frontiers”. There is nothing wrong with France, say, wanting to purchase more financial stability than America—and having tighter regulations—at the price of giving up some financial innovations. Nor with Brazil giving its state-owned development bank special regulatory treatment, if the country wishes, so that it can fill in for missing long-term credit markets.In short, global financial regulation is neither feasible, nor prudent, nor desirable. What finance needs instead are some sensible traffic rules that will allow nations (and in some cases regions) to implement their own regulations while preventing adverse spillovers. If you want an analogy, think of a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade for world finance rather than a World Trade Organisation. The genius of the GA TT regime was that it left room for governments to craft their own social and economic policies as long as they did not follow blatantly protectionist policies and did not discriminate among their trade partners.Fortify the home front firstSimilarly, a new financial order can be constructed on the back of a minimal set of international guidelines. The new arrangements would certainly involve an improved IMF with better representation and increased resources. It might also require an international financial charter with limited aims, focused on financial transparency, consultation among national regulators, and limits on jurisdictions (such as offshore centres) that export financial instability. But the responsibility for regulating leverage, setting capital standards, and supervising financial markets would rest squarely at the national level. Domestic regulators and supervisors would no longer hide behind international codes. Just as an exporter of widgets has to abide by product-safety standards in all its markets, global financial firms would have to comply with regulatory requirements that may differ across host countries.The main challenge facing such a regime would be the incentive for regulatory arbitrage. So the rules would recognise governments’ right to intervene in cross-border financial transactions—but only in so far as the intent is to prevent competition from less-strict jurisdictions from undermining domestic regulations.Of course, like-minded countries that want to go into deeper financial integration and harmonise their regulations would be free to do so, provided (as in the GA TT) they do not use this as an excuse for financial protectionism. One can imagine the euro zone eventually taking this route and opting for a common regulator. The Chiang Mai initiative in Asia may ultimately also produce a regional zone of deep integration around an Asian monetary fund. But the rest of the world would have to live with a certain amount of financial segmentation—the necessary counterpart toregulatory fragmentation.If this leaves you worried, turn again to the Bretton Woods experience. Despite limited liberalisation, that system produced huge increases in cross-border trade and investment. The reason is simple and remains relevant as ever: an architecture that respects national diversity does more to advance the cause of globalisation than ambitious plans that assume it away.One crunch after anotherCALLS for co-ordinated fiscal stimulus to lift the world out of recession were joined at the weekend by Larry Summers, Barack Obama’s top economic adviser. Such co-ordination has been absent up to now, though that could change at the meeting of G20 leaders in London in early April. But there has been plenty of fiscal stimulus, led by America’s $787 billion package, as many governments seek to offset a collapse in private demand. There are worries not only about how much these measures cost up front but their longer-term effects on government finances.The direct costs of such packages are indeed large. The IMF reckons that for G20 countries stimulus packages will add up to 1.5% of GDP in 2009 (calculated as a weighted average using purchasing power parity). Together with the huge sums used to bail out firms in the financial sector (3.5% of GDP and counting in America, for example), these are immediate ways in which the crisis is affecting public finances across the world. But they are not the only ones.A downturn affects government finances in other ways. Shares in most rich countries have plummeted. The MSCI developed-world index, which tracks stocks in 23 rich countries, has lost more than half its value since the beginning of 2008. Falling share prices hit government revenues as capital-gains tax takes decline. Similarly, taxes on financial-sector profits, a significant part of government revenue in many countries, have evaporated. And expenditures onautomatic stabilisers such as unemployment insurance rise in a recession. All this widens budget deficits.Direct stimulus measures also push up government deficits and debt, although the type of intervention affects how long-lasting its effects are. Most expenditure, such as infrastructure spending, is temporary (although it affects debt permanently). Revenue measures, such as tax cuts, are politically difficult to reverse. The question is whether this threatens the solvency of governments.A paper on the state of the world’s public finances issued by the IMF in the run-up to the G20 meetings takes a stab at identifying and measuring the fiscal implications of the crisis for both rich and developing countries. Its conclusions are sobering. For rich G20 countries, fiscal balances will worsen by 6% of GDP between 2007 and 2009. Government debt will come off worse. Between 2007 and 2009, the debt-to-GDP ratio of rich countries is projected to rise by 14.5 percentage points. In the medium term, the outlook is even more worrying. Government debt for the average rich country will be more than 100% of GDP by 2014 compared with 70% in 2000 and 40% in 1980.A great deal of uncertainty surrounds these estimates because so much depends on guesswork. Economic recovery, for example, could be slower than the IMF’s current projections: g rowth forecasts were revised down several times in 2008. Governments may also have to shoulder more burdens—private pension plans, which have been hammered by the crisis, may require government support. And the eventual cost of financial-sector bailouts will depend on how quickly and at whatlevel prices stabilise of the assets governments have taken on. Past experience suggests that there is enormous scope for variation. Sweden had a recovery rate of 94% five years after its crisis in 1991; Japan had recovered only 1% of assets in the five years after its troubles of 1997.The IMF points out that debt levels, while high, are not unprecedented by historical standards. But the worry is that primary fiscal balances in four-fifths of the rich countries studied by the IMF will be too high even in 2012 to allow debt to be stabilised, or brought down to 60% of GDP (which is the IMF benchmark for debt levels), even though revenues will recover as countries emerge from the crisis. What this implies is that, over time, fiscal deficits will have to be trimmed. And therein lies the rub.Most rich countries have rapidly ageing populations. Unless entitlement systems are reformed (by reducing benefits) or tax bases broadened, fiscal deficits will rise still further. Some of the IMF’s ideas about how to do this will seem unpalatable: it argues that health systems, for example, will have to become less generous. But rich countries were always going to have to come to terms with the fiscal consequences of demographic pressures on existing welfare systems sooner or later. The crisis will bring this problem more urgently to the fore.Inadequate有时人们只能在普普通通的事情上取的一致意见。

经济学人精读 24 以色列科技帝国

经济学人精读 24 以色列科技帝国2015年9月30日10:19 阅读2351The scale-up nationIsrael is trying to turn its Davids into Goliaths扩展的国度以色列正试图将它的大卫转变成巨人歌利亚ISRAEL is rightly proud of its status as a startup nation. It boasts the world’s highest concentration of high-tech startups per head. Almost 1,000 new firms are launched every year. But all this entrepreneurial activity is not creating enough jobs as the population gr ows: the share of people employed in the high-tech sector has declined from 10.7% of th e workforce in 2006-08 to 8.9% in 2013. Startups also fail to solve another problem: the c ountry’s high retail prices, which are 20% higher for basic products than in other rich cou ntries, according to the OECD, a think-tank.身为创业国度，以色列理所应当感到自豪。

它的人均高科技创业公司数在全世界首屈一指。

每年约有一千家新公司成立。

但随着人口增长，所有这些创业活动并没有创造足够的就业岗位：受雇于高科技产业的人员占全国劳动人口的比例由 2006 年至 2008 年的 10.7%降至2013年的8.9%。

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Autism?自闭症Why it's not “Rain Woman”?为什么它不是“雨女”Women have fewer cognitive disorders than men do because their bodies are better at ignoring the mutations which cause them?与男性相比，患有认知障碍的女性较少，因为她们自身的身体能更好的忽略导致认知障碍的基因突变AUTISM is a strange condition. Sometimes its symptoms of “social blindness”(an inability to read or comprehend the emotions of others) occur alone. This is dubbed high-functioning autism, or Asperger's syndrome. Though their fellow men and women may regard them as a bit odd, high-functioning autists are often successful (sometimes very successful) members of society. On other occasions, though, autism manifests as part of a range of cognitive problems. Then, the condition is debilitating. What is common to those on all parts of the so-called autistic spectrum is that they are more often men than women —so much more often that one school of thought suggests autism is an extreme manifestation of what it means, mentally, to be male. Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls are. For high-functioning autism, the ratio is seven to one.?自闭症是一种奇怪的状态。

有时它是由“社会失明”症状（无法阅读或理解他人的情绪）导致的孤独。

这被称为高功能自闭症，或亚斯伯格症候群。

虽然他们的男性和女性同伴会认为他们有点奇怪，但高功能自闭患者通常是成功的社会人士（有时非常成功）。

然而，另一些场合，自闭症表现为一系列认知问题的一部分。

那么，条件逐渐衰弱。

对于那些所有被称为自闭症患者范围的人来说共同点是男性远多于女性，以至于一个学校认为自闭症意味着一种极端的在心理上表现为一名男性。

比起女孩而言，男孩有四倍的可能性被诊断为自闭症。

至于高功能自闭症，比率达到7比1。

Moreover, what is true of autism is true, to a lesser extent, of a lot of other neurological and cognitive disorders. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is diagnosed around three times more often in boys than in girls. “Intellectual disability”, a catch-all term for congenital low IQ, is 30-50% more common in boys, as is epilepsy. In fact, these disorders frequently show up in combination. For instance, children diagnosed with an autistic-spectrum disorder[1] often also receive a diagnosis of ADHD.?此外，自闭症的真相，在较小程度上，就是神经病学的认知障碍的真相。

被诊断为注意力缺乏症的男大约是女孩的三倍。

“智力残疾”，一个全面概括先天性智商低下的术语，在男孩中常见比例多达30%~50%，癫痫症也是。

事实上，这些疾病经常共同出现。

例如，被诊断为自闭症谱系障碍的小孩经常也收到ADHD的诊断。

Autism's precise causes are unclear, but genes are important. Though no mutation which, by itself, causes autism has yet been discovered, well over 100 are known that make someone with them more vulnerable to the condition.? 导致自闭症的确切原因还不知道，但是基因很重要原因。

虽然还没发现是由于它自身的突变导致自闭症，但超过100个基因被认为是使某些人在环境影响下更容易受到攻击的对象。

Most of these mutations are as common in women as in men, so one explanation for the divergent incidence is that male brains are more vulnerable than female ones to equivalent levels of genetic disruption. This is called the female-protective model. The other broad explanation, social-bias theory, is that the difference is illusory. Girls are being under-diagnosed because of differences either in the ways they are assessed, or in the ways they cope with the condition, rather than because they actually have it less. Some researchers claim, for example, that girls are better able to hide their symptoms.?这些突变在男性和女性中是一样普遍的，所以一个对分歧发生率的解释是对于同等的基因毁坏，男性大脑比女性的更容易受伤害。

这被称为女性保护模式。

另一个广发的解释是社会偏见理论，认为这些不同是虚幻的。

这些被诊断不足的女孩，因为她们被评估的方式或对环境的处理不同，而不是他们真的很少有这个症状。

例如，一些研究者声称，女孩能更好的隐藏这些症状。

The weaker sex?弱势性别To investigate this question, Sebastien Jacquemont of the University Hospital of Lausanne and his colleagues analysed genetic data from two groups of children with cognitive abnormalities. Those in one group, 800 strong, were specifically autistic. Those in the other, 16,000 strong, had a range of problems.?为了调查这个问题，洛桑医科大学的医生Sebastien Jacquemont和他的同事分析来自两组患有认识异常症状孩子的基因数据。

一组有800人明显确定患有自闭症；另一组是明显有一系列问题。

Dr Jacquemont has just published his results in the American Journal of Human Genetics. His crucial finding was that girls in both groups more often had mutations of the sort associated with abnormal neural development than boys did. This was true both for copy-number variants (CNVs, which are variations in the number of copies in a chromosome of particular sections of DNA), and single-nucleotide variants (SNVs, which are alterations to single genetic letters in the DNA message).?医生Jacquemont刚将他的研究成果发布在美国人类遗传学杂志上。

他的关键发现是两组中，女孩比男孩更多有伴随异常神经发展种类的基因突变。

这在拷贝数量变异组（CNVs，一组对DNA特定部分的染色体进行复制）和单核苷酸变异组（SNVs，修改DNA信使中单独的基因字母）两组中都是对的。

On the face of it, this seems compelling evidence for the female-protective model. Since all the children whose data Dr Jacquemont examined had been diagnosed with problems, if the girls had more serious mutations than the boys did, that suggests other aspects of their physiology were covering up the consequences. Females are thus, if this interpretation is correct, better protected from developing symptoms than males are. And, as further confirmation, Dr Jacquemont's findings tally with a?study?published three years ago, which found that CNVs in autistic girls spanned more genes (and were thus, presumably, more damaging), than those in autistic boys.?从表面上看，这似乎是令人信服的女性保护模式证据。