Vocabulary

a dip in productivity – снижение производительности; to dip – снижаться, падать

the global boom – бум в мировой экономике; tech boom – бум в области высоких технологий

to curtail investment = to cut, reduce investment

to grind to a halt – замедляться до полной остановки

to edge up – чуть подрасти, увеличиться

labor costs – издержки на оплату труда

to meet the demand for – удовлетворить спрос на

to saturate – насыщать; IT spending has reached a saturation point – расходы на ИТ достигли своего предела

to give credit to somebody – отдать должное кому-либо; most of the credit went to tech investment alone - в основном считалось, что производительность росла лишь за счет инвестиций в высокие технологии

Useful phrases to memorize

by all accouts – по всем признакам, по всем приметам

the truth is – дело в том, что; по правде говоря

Exercises

1. Pronounce the following:

staggering, vogue, pivotal, crucial, virtuous, curtail, guess, mere, volatile, saturation, breakthrough, retail

2. Find in the text the synonyms to the following:

a downturn in productivity, a stop, important (2), U.S. central bank, expansion, to employ, to push up, to limit, goods and services produced, infamous, unstable, tools and machinery.

3. Translate into English:

1. Цены на акции будут расти.

2. Произвести вдвое больше товаров, чем за десятилетие.

3. Производительность является одним из решающих факторов экономики.

4. Нужно отдать должное роли производительности в состоянии американской экономики, вызывающей зависть у многих.

5. Рост числа вновь нанятых рабочих привел к росту издержек на оплату труда.

6. ФРС борется с инфляцией, вызванной ростом заработной платы, путем повышения процентных ставок.

7. Уровень производительности отличается неустойчивостью.

8. Компании стремятся удовлетворить спрос на товары и услуги.

4. Find in the text various English equivalents to the following:

1) расти 2) увеличить 3) снижать 4) снижаться 5) снижение

The Downside of Higher Productivity

A small jump may inspire complacency – and slow the push for labor reform

By Jack Ewing

At last, some good economic news for Europe. Labor productivity, the amount of goods produced per hour of work, rose 1.3% in 2004 for 15 countries that form the core of the European Union, according to the New York-based Conference Board, a group sponsored by industry that tracks world economic cycles.That’s a notable improvement on 2003, when productivity rose a meager 0.9%

What prompted the jump? Experts are still dissecting the data, but some posit that last year’s rate may be partly a payoff for the greater flexibility by Europen workers. By showing more willingness to tailor work hours to meet demand and accept changes in work rules, some unions have allowed companies to make better use of capacity and more quickly deploy labor-saving technology.

But dig deeper and you will quickly learn there’s not much to cheer about. The productivity jump, in fact, may be high enough to renew European leaders’ complacency but too low to change the Continent’s sluggish dynamic.

Europe’s thicket of regulations, such as restrictions on shopping hours, are another big barrier to productivity growth. They dampen competition and discourage investments in new technology. Europe also needs to attack some of the other, less-publisized causes for its lagging performance.Productivity-enhancing technology is the result of innovative minds, but in Germany, spots at most institutions of higher education are still allocated by a government bureaucracy. The German government has launched a programme to create “elite” universities that can compete with the likes of Oхford University and Massachusettes Institute of Technology, but German institutions won’t be world-class in fields such as business education until students have to compete for the best places. Progress in that direction has been much too slow.

Too bad, because the Conference Board’s report shows that Western Europeans need only look to the East to see how fast their economies could grow if they were unshackled.

Business Week, 2005

Notes

1. Conference Board – корпорация “Конференс борд”, частная научно- исследовательская оганизация в США, проводит исследования и обмен полученными данными в интересах повышения деловой активности в стране

2. an improvement on 2003 – по сравнению с

3. unions = trade unions

4. labor-saving technology – трудосберегающая технология

5. thicket of regulations – многочисленные правила и предписания

6. shopping hours – часы работы магазинов

7. spots – места в ВУЗах

8. too bad – очень жаль

9. to unshackle – здесь: снять ограничения

When cities are too small

A study eyes size vs. productivity

Urban economists have long theorized that there is an optimal size for a city to maximize the productivity of its workers. Up to a certain size, the economies of scale afforded by urban infrastructure improve productivity. But once a city gets too large, conjecture can actually cause productivity to drop.

The problem was that finding city-by-city data on productivity to test the theory was very hard. However, it turns out China keeps track of detailed output data for almost 700 of its largest cities. Using the data, a new study by Chun-Chung Au and Vernon Henderson of Brown University estimates the optimal size for city productivity, taking into account the relative proportion of manufacturing vs. services.

They found that the best size for a Chinese city with an equal balance of services and manufacturing would be between 1.4 million and 2.6 million workers. Cities that were more dependent on manufacturing would be most productive at a smaller scale, while service-based cities would benefit from being larger, perhaps between 2 million and 4 million workers. (These estimates for China are unlikely to apply to the U.S. Nevertheless, for a point of comparison, New York, one of the most heavily services-dependent U.S. cities, has a workforce of roughly 3.5 million.)

Surprisingly, Au and Henderson found that rather than suffering over-congestion, most cities in China were actually too small compared with their optimal scale. They attribute this to Chinese governmental policy restricting internal migration.

By Margaret Popper

Business Week

Notes

1. city-by-city data – информация в разбивке по городам

2. internal migration - people’s migration inside the country