Unit 1 financial system

The active vocabulary of the unit

assets liabilities to comprise public finance corporate finance provision essential services encouragement implementation budget revenue assumptions to be derived from economic entity multilateral development banks applicable

government consumption transfer payments retirement benefits scarce resources to avoid burdens to communicate plans allocation building societies mutual organization mortgage lending credit unions competitive rates trust companies lending institution to manage estates a trustee provide loans

insurance agents remuneration contractual institutions  to be entitled to security firms to facilitate prudential shareholders prominent multiple nations bilateral roughly to set up mutual interest formerly tools of investment promoting

Pre-reading task:

1. Think and discuss in pairs.

• ∙ What do you know about finance?

• ∙ What do you know about budget and its formation?

2. Provide definitions of the following terms. Use your business dictionary to check.

1) funds, 2) overdraft, 3) capital 4) taxes, 5) security; 6) benefit, 7) savers, 8) borrowers, 9) investors, 10) services

Text A

Finance is a set of activities dealing with the management of funds. More specifically, it is the allocation of assets and liabilities or it is a branch of economics that studies the management of money and other assets. Finance comprises three parts: public finance, corporate finance and personal finance.

Public finance is the provision of money through taxes to be spent by national and local government authorities on projects of national and local benefit. Public finance has the following functions:

a) provision of essential services;

b) encouragement or control of a particular sector of the economy;

c) implementation of social security;

d) encouragement of the growth of economy as a whole.

Basically, any organization or unit in society can be an economic entity. Examples of economic entities are companies, federal agencies, hospitals etc.

Corporate finance is the area of finance dealing with monetary decisions that business enterprises make. The primary goal of corporate finance is to maximize shareholder incomes. Although it is in principle different from managerial finance which studies the financial decisions of all firms, rather than corporations alone, the main concepts in the study of corporate finance are applicable to the financial problems of all kinds of firms.

Personal finance refers to all financial decisions and activities of an individual, this could include budgeting, insurance, savings, investing, debt servicing, mortgages etc. Financial planning generally involves analyzing your current financial position and predicting short-term and long-term needs.

A financial system is the system that allows transfer of money between savers (and investors) and borrowers. A financial system can operate on a global or regional level. The major instrument of any financial system is the budget. It is a plan for saving, borrowing and spending. It is an important concept in microeconomics. Budget helps to aid the planning of actual operations by forcing managers to consider how the conditions might change and what steps should be taken now and by encouraging managers to consider problems before they arise. A government budget is a legal document that is often passed by the legislature, and approved by the chief executive or president.

The two basic elements of any budget are the revenues and expenses. In case of a government, revenues are derived primarily from taxes. Government expenses include spending on current goods and services, which economists call government consumption; government investment expenditures such as infrastructure investment or research expenditure; and transfer payments like unemployment or retirement benefits.

Budgets have an economic, political and technical basis. Unlike a pure economic budget, they are not entirely designed to allocate scarce resources for the best economic use. They also have a political basis in an attempt to get benefits.

3. Use your dictionary to find the nouns and translate the verb – noun combination into Ukrainian. Remember the suffixes.

to allocate - to act -	6) to consume - 7) to pay -
to encourage - to implement - to provide -	8) to grow - 9) to employ - 10) to invest -

4. Decide which nouns are countable (C) and which are uncountable (U) ones. Use them in sentences of your own.

1) information ( C / U ) 2) agency ( C / U ) 3) economics ( C / U ) 4) entity ( C / U )

5) branch ( C / U ) 6) money ( C / U ) 7) tax ( C / U ) 8) economy ( C / U )

5. Use the words in the box to complete the sentences.

provide motivate evaluate allocate communicate

Other essentials of budget include:

• to (1) …. resources;

• to (2)… plans to various responsibility center managers;

• to (3) …. managers to have a desire to achieve budget goals;

• to (4) … the performance of managers;

• to (5)… visibility into the company's performance.

6. Put the following countries in the right order.