（经济、科技、社会科学类）
1、 Plumper
How does the country’s economy compare with those of the EU?
SOME of the concerns surrounding Turkey’s application to join the European Union, to be voted on by the EU’s Council of Ministers on December 17th, are economic-in particular, the country’s relative poverty. Its GDP per head is less than a third of the average for the 15 pre-2004 members of the EU. But it is not far off that of one of the ten new members which joined on May 1st 2004 (Latvia), and it is much the same as those of two countries, Bulgaria and Romania, which this week concluded accession talks with the EU that could make them full members on January 1st 2007.
Furthermore, the country’s recent economic progress has been, according to Donald Johnston, the secretary-general of the OECD, "stunning". GDP in the second quarter of the year was 13.4% higher than a year earlier, a rate of growth that no EU country comes close to matching. Turkey’s inflation rate has just fallen into single figures for the first time since 1972, and this week the country reached agreement with the IMF on a new three-year, $10 billion economic programme that will, according to the IMF’s managing director, Rodrigo Rato, "help Turkey... reduce inflation toward European levels, and enhance the economy’s resilience".
Resilience has not historically been the country’s economic strong point. As recently as 2001, GDP fell by over 7%. It fell by more than 5% in 1994, and by just under 5% in 1999. Indeed, throughout the 1990s growth oscillated like an electrocardiogram recording a violent heart attack. This irregularity has been one of the main reasons (along with red tape and corruption) why the country has failed dismally to attract much-needed foreign direct investment. Its stock of such investment (as a percentage of GDP) is lower now than it was in the 1980s, and annual inflows have scarcely ever reached $1 billion (whereas Ireland attracted over $25 billion in 2003, as did Brazil in every year from 1998 to 2000).
One deterrent to foreign investors is due to disappear on January 1st 2005. On that day, Turkey will take away the right of virtually every one of its citizens to call themselves a millionaire. Six noughts will be removed from the face value of the lira; one unit of the local currency will henceforth be worth what 1m are now-ie, about €0.53 ($0.70). Goods will have to be priced in both the new and old lira for the whole of the year, but foreign bankers and investors can begin to look forward to a time in Turkey when they will no longer have to juggle mentally with indeterminate strings of zeros.
2、 Fast-food succession
Another change at the top
CHARLIE BELL became chief executive of McDonald's in April. Within a month doctors told him that he had colorectal cancer. After stockmarket hours on November 22nd, the fast-food firm said he had resigned; it would need a third boss in under a year. Yet when the market opened, its share price barely dipped then edged higher. After all, McDonald's had, again, shown how to act swiftly and decisively in appointing a new boss.
Mr Bell himself got the top job when Jim Cantalupo died of a heart attack hours before he was due to address a convention of McDonald's franchisees. Mr Cantalupo was a McDonald's veteran brought out of retirement in January 2003 to help remodel the firm after sales began falling because of dirty restaurants, indifferent service and growing concern about junk food. He devised a recovery plan, backed by massive marketing, and promoted Mr Bell to chief operating officer. When Mr Cantalupo died, a rapidly convened board confirmed Mr Bell, a 44-year-old Australian already widely seen as his heir apparent, in the top job. The convention got its promised chief executive's address, from the firm's first non-American leader.
Yet within weeks executives had to think about what to do if Mr Bell became too ill to continue. Perhaps Mr Bell had the same thing on his mind: he usually introduced Jim Skinner, the 60-year-old vice-chairman, to visitors as the "steady hand at the wheel". Now Mr Skinner (pictured), an expert on the firm's overseas operations, becomes chief executive, and Mike Roberts, head of its American operations, joins the board as chief operating officer.
Is Mr Roberts now the new heir apparent? Maybe. McDonald's has brought in supposedly healthier choices such as salads and toasted sandwiches worldwide and, instead of relying for most of its growth on opening new restaurants, has turned to upgrading its 31,000 existing ones. America has done best at this; under Mr Roberts, like-for-like sales there were up by 7.5% in October on a year earlier.
The new team's task is to keep the revitalisation plan on course, especially overseas, where some American brands are said to face political hostility from consumers. This is a big challenge. Is an in-house succession the best way to tackle it? Mr Skinner and Mr Roberts are both company veterans, having joined in the 1970s. Some recent academic studies find that the planned succession of a new boss groomed from within, such as Mr Bell and now (arguably) Mr Roberts, produces better results than looking hastily, or outside, for one. McDonald's smooth handling of its serial misfortunes at the top certainly seems to prove the point. Even so, everyone at McDonald's must be hoping that it will be a long time before the firm faces yet another such emergency.
3 、Staggering
Things are slow to change in America's boardrooms
THE annual review of American company board practices by Korn/Ferry, a firm of headhunters, is a useful indicator of the health of corporate governance. This year's review, published on November 12th, shows that the Sarbanes-Oxley act, passed in 2002 to try to prevent a repeat of corporate collapses such as Enron's and WorldCom's, has had an impact on the boardroom--albeit at an average implementation cost that Korn/Ferry estimates at $5.1m per firm.
Two years ago, only 41% of American firms said they regularly held meetings of directors without their chief executive present; this year the figure was 93%. But some things have been surprisingly unaffected by the backlash against corporate scandals. For example, despite a growing feeling that former chief executives should not sit on their company's board, the percentage of American firms where they do has actually edged up, from 23% in 2003 to 25% in 2004.
Also, disappointingly few firms have split the jobs of chairman and chief executive. Another survey of American boards published this week, by A.T. Kearney, a firm of consultants, found that in 2002 14% of the boards of S&P 500 firms had separated the roles, and a further 16% said they planned to do so. But by 2004 only 23% overall had taken the plunge. A survey earlier in the year by consultants at McKinsey found that 70% of American directors and investors supported the idea of splitting the jobs, which is standard practice in Europe.
Another disappointment is the slow progress in abolishing "staggered" boards--ones where only one-third of the directors are up for re-election each year, to three-year terms. Invented as a defence against takeover, such boards, according to a new Harvard Law School study by Lucian Bebchuk and Alma Cohen, are unambiguously "associated with an economically significant reduction in firm value".
Despite this, the percentage of S&P 500 firms with staggered boards has fallen only slightly--from 63% in 2001 to 60% in 2003, according to the Investor Responsibility Research Centre. And many of those firms that have been forced by shareholders to abolish the system are doing so only slowly. Merck, a pharmaceutical company in trouble over the possible side-effects of its arthritis drug Vioxx, is allowing its directors to run their full term before introducing a system in which they are all re-elected (or otherwise) annually. Other companies' staggered boards are entrenched in their corporate charters, which cannot be amended by a shareholders' vote. Anyone who expected the scandals of 2001 to bring about rapid change in the balance of power between managers and owners was, at best, naive.
4、 Burnished
Up goes gold, down goes the dollar
MOST economists hate gold. Not, you understand, that they would turn up their noses at a bar or two. But they find the reverence in which many hold the metal almost irrational. That it was used as money for millennia is irrelevant: it isn't any more. Modern money takes the form of paper or, more often, electronic data. To economists, gold is now just another commodity.
So why is its price soaring? Over the past week, this has topped $450 a troy ounce, up by 9% since the beginning of the year and 77% since April 2001. Ah, comes the reply, gold transactions are denominated in dollars, and the rise in the price simply reflects the dollar's fall in terms of other currencies, especially the euro, against which it hit a new low this week. Expressed in euros, the gold price has moved much less. However, there is no iron link, as it were, between the value of the dollar and the value of gold. A rising price of gold, like that of anything else, can reflect an increase in demand as well as a depreciation of its unit of account.
This is where gold bulls come in. The fall in the dollar is important, but mainly because as a store of value the dollar stinks. With a few longish rallies, the greenback has been on a downward trend since it came off the gold standard in 1971. Now it is suffering one of its sharper declines. At the margin, extra demand has come from those who think dollars--indeed any money backed by nothing more than promises to keep inflation low--a decidedly risky investment, mainly because America, with the world's reserve currency, has been able to create and borrow so many of them. The least painful way of repaying those dollars is to make them worth less.
The striking exception to this extra demand comes from central banks, which would like to sell some of the gold they already have. As a legacy of the days when their currencies were backed by the metal, central banks still hold one-fifth of the world's gold. Last month the Bank of France said it would sell 500 tonnes in coming years. But big sales by central banks can cause the price to plunge--as when the Bank of England sold 395 tonnes between 1999 and 2002. The result was an agreement between central banks to co-ordinate and limit future sales.
If the price of gold marches higher, this agreement will presumably be ripped up, although a dollar crisis might make central banks think twice about switching into paper money. Will the overhang of central-bank gold drag the price down again? Not necessarily. As James Grant, gold bug and publisher of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, a newsletter, points out, in recent years the huge glut of government debt has not stopped a sharp rise in its price.
5 、Crude awakening
A battle between two energy exchanges
OPEN-OUTCRY trading is supposed to be a quaint, outdated practice, rapidly being replaced by sleeker, cheaper electronic systems. Try telling that to the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), the world's largest commodities exchange. On November 1st the NYMEX opened an open-outcry pit in Dublin to handle Brent crude futures, the benchmark contract for pricing two-thirds of the world's oil.
The NYMEX is trying to snatch liquidity from London's International Petroleum Exchange (IPE), which trades the most Brent contracts; the New York exchange has hitherto concentrated on West Texas Intermediate, an American benchmark grade. The new pit is a response to the IPE's efforts to modernise. On the same day as NYMEX traders started shouting Brent prices in Dublin, the IPE did away with its morning open-outcry session: now such trades must be electronic, or done in the pit after lunch.
The New York exchange claims that customers, such as hedge funds or energy companies, prefer open-outcry because it allows for more liquidity. Although most other exchanges are heading in the opposite direction, in commodity markets such as the NYMEX, pressure from "locals"--self-employed traders--is helping to prop up open-outcry, although some reckon that customers pay up to five times as much as with electronic systems. Even the IPE has no plans to abolish its floor. Only last month it signed a lease, lasting until 2011, for its trading floor in London.
Dublin's new pit is "showing promise", says Rob Laughlin, a trader with Man Financial, despite a few technical glitches. On its first day it handled 5,726 lots of Brent (each lot, or contract, is 1,000 barrels), over a third of the volume in the IPE's new morning electronic session. By the year's end, predicts Mr Laughlin, it should be clear whether the venture will be viable. It would stand a better chance if it moved to London. It may yet: it started in Ireland because regulatory approval could be obtained faster there than in Britain.
Ultimately, having both exchanges offering similar contracts will be unsustainable. Stealing liquidity from an established market leader, as the NYMEX is trying to do, is a hard task. Eurex, Europe's largest futures exchange, set up shop in Chicago this year, intending to grab American Treasury-bond contracts from the Chicago Board of Trade. It has made little headway. And the NYMEX has dabbled in Brent contracts before, without success.
Given the importance of liquidity in exchanges, why do the IPE and the NYMEX not band together? There have been merger talks before, and something might yet happen. Some say that the freewheeling NYMEX and the more staid IPE could never mix. For now, in any case, the two exchanges will slug it out--across the Irish Sea as well as across the Atlantic.
6 、Robo-traders
Computerised trading agents may help humans build better markets
THANKS to slumping markets, investment banks are shedding many of their highly-paid traders. When markets recover, the banks might be tempted to replace them with rather cheaper talent. One alternative has been around for a while but has yet to catch on: autonomous trading agents-computers programmed to act like the human version without such pesky costs as holidays, lunch breaks or bonuses. Program trading has, of course, been done before; some blamed the 1987 stockmarket crash on computers instructed with simple decision-making rules. But robots can be smarter than that.
Dave Cliff, a researcher at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Bristol, England, has been creating trading robots for seven years. In computer simulations he lets them evolve "genetically", and so allows them to adapt and fit models of real-world financial markets. His experiments have suggested that a redesign of some markets could lead to greater efficiency. Last year, a research group at IBM showed that Mr Cliff's artificial traders could consistently beat the human variety, in various kinds of market. Nearly all take the shape of an auction. One well-known type is the English auction, familiar to patrons of the salesrooms of Christie's and Sotheby's, where sellers keep mum on their offer price, and buyers increase their bids by stages until only one remains.
At the other extreme is the Dutch auction, familiar to 17th-century tulip-traders in the Netherlands as well as to bidders for American Treasury bonds. Here, buyers remain silent, and a seller reduces his price until it is accepted. Most markets for shares, commodities, foreign exchange and derivatives are a hybrid of these two types: buyers and sellers can announce their bid or offer prices at any time, and deals are constantly being closed, a so-called "continuous double auction".
Mr Cliff's novel idea was to apply his evolutionary computer programs to marketplaces themselves. Why not, he thought, try and see what types of auction would let traders converge most quickly towards an equilibrium price? The results were surprising. In his models, auctions that let buyers and sellers bid at any time like most of today's financial exchanges were less efficient than ones that required relatively more bids from either buyers or sellers. These "evolved auctions" also withstood big market shocks, such as crashes and panics, better than today's real-world versions. Mr Cliff's most recent results, which will be presented in Sydney, Australia, on December 10th, show that the best type of auction for any market depends crucially on even slight differences in the number of buyers and sellers.
Bank of America has been investigating these new auctions, along with robotic traders, for possible use in electronic exchanges. The hope is that today's financial auctions and online marketplaces might work better by becoming more like their English and Dutch forebears. But what to call such multi-ethnic hybrids? Here's introducing the "Cliffhanger".
7、 Currency teaser
A strong rupee is giving policymakers a new sort of headache
THE Indian finance ministry's mid-year review, released this week, sees the external sector as a silver lining around the country's huge fiscal deficit. "Buoyant" and "encouraging" are the words used to describe three consecutive quarters of current-account surplus--the first in a quarter-century. Add to that swelling foreign-exchange reserves and a stronger rupee, and some are arguing that it is time for drastic liberalisation of India's foreign-exchange regime. They could be disappointed.
For most of the past decade, the nominal value of the rupee has been allowed to decline gently against the dollar, by about 5% a year, thus staying fairly steady in real terms. This year, however, it has been appreciating in real terms (and, since June, nominally as well). It would have done so more sharply had the central bank not been buying dollars with gusto. Exporters of manufactured goods, obsessed with price competition from China, are aghast at the rise--and at the prospect held out by some forecasters that a sustained boom in India's IT exports means it will continue.
The rupee's recent strength is only partly related to India's prowess in software and the mushrooming of "business-process outsourcing" in such projects as call-centres. The chunky surplus on invisibles owes more to remittances: non-resident Indians, attracted by the stability of the rupee and its higher interest rates, have been moving their offshore deposits back home. Similarly, Indian companies are borrowing more in dollars without selling rupees forward to hedge repayments. The trade deficit, meanwhile, has been shrinking, as imports grow slowly.
The inflows have boosted foreign-exchange reserves by some $20 billion this year, to $66 billion, or 12 months'-worth of imports. The size of this cushion has triggered some calls for further liberalisation of the labyrinthine foreign-exchange controls that India still maintains, despite the move in 1993 towards rupee convertibility for trade purposes. In recent months, some controls have duly been eased. It is now simpler, for example, for individuals to open foreign-currency bank accounts, and for travellers to get hold of foreign exchange. And non-resident Indians have been allowed to take out money acquired through inheritance, or from rents and dividends.
Some commentators have taken all this as a harbinger of full capital-account convertibility. That is not on the cards. The experience of 1991, when India ran out of money, has left the central bank prone to caution--an approach it felt was vindicated by the East Asian crisis of 1997-98. With war in Iraq looming and a turbulent oil market, some risk aversion is understandable. India's fiscal deficit--some 10% of GDP and widening--is another reason for moving slowly. Just as one rating agency, Moody's, is considering upgrading India's external debt, another, Fitch, has warned that its local-currency rating is under threat. Nor is it certain that opening the capital account would mean a weaker rupee. It might even attract more capital inflows. As India's exporters are learning, convertibility is a two-way street.
8 、Fiat redux
Fiat's agony spreads to workers as 8,100 jobs go
THE giant Mirafiori plant in Turin is the heart of Fiat Auto, the troubled car division of the Fiat group. As the early shift trooped home at 2pm on October 9th, the mood was pessimistic. The workers knew that the bosses were meeting union leaders later that afternoon in Rome to announce 8,100 job cuts across the group's car factories. This is on top of 3,000 job losses announced earlier this year. Workers expect one-third of Mirafiori's 12,000 employees to be gone by next July. Fiat says that all but 500 of the total are temporary lay-offs, to last about a year. But the morose workers passing through Mirafiori's gates doubt that the jobs will ever come back, whatever the firm says about new models and future investment.
Fiat Auto will lose around €1 billion ($987m) this year, wiping out profits in other parts of the group, which makes everything from lorries and tractors to robots. Fiat's bosses have been in denial for years about the company's massive over-capacity, the cause of growing losses as sales slumped. Five years ago Fiat Auto made 2.6m cars a year and profits of €758m. Since then it has recorded a loss in every year bar one. This year it will produce barely 1.9m cars. Its banks forced a restructuring in May, and the chief executive of its Fiat group parent had to resign a few weeks later.
The pain is bad enough in northern Italy, where unemployment is barely 4%, but it will be felt more elsewhere. The Termini Imerese plant in Sicily is to lay off 1,800 workers. Unions say that cuts among suppliers could double the number of people hit. The local official jobless rate is already 18% (though this ignores a lively "informal" economy). This is posing a nasty problem for the government of Silvio Berlusconi, which polled strongly in Sicily but is not inclined to aid troubled firms.
Fiat's belated willingness to take tough steps to align capacity with demand is down to the group's new boss, Gabriele Galateri, chosen in June to rescue the firm, which is 30% owned by Agnelli family interests. His aim is to restore credibility, arrest the alarming plunge in the company's share price and persuade the banks that he is sorting out the Fiat Auto mess, so as to win their support for a further recapitalisation.
Closely watching this Italian drama are bosses of General Motors, owners of 20% of Fiat Auto. The Italians have an option to sell the remaining shares to GM from January 2004. GM, which has its own problems in Europe, is desperate for Fiat Auto to sort itself out before it can be forced to take over. Although the Agnelli family patriarch, the ailing 81-year-old Gianni Agnelli, is opposed to such a sale, most analysts expect that Italy's proudest manufacturing company will end up in American hands.
9 、Anything to declare?
Customs officers' powers are excessive, but so is smuggling
RICHARD EVANS, a retired lorry driver, and his family were travelling in Spain last summer when their camper van broke down. They left it to be brought back by the AA. But customs officers at Dover claimed it was being used for smuggling. They seized the vehicle and all its contents, including 9,000 cigarettes and 20 bottles of spirits. The van, worth £20,000 ($30,800), is still impounded. It even took Mr Evans six months to recover his 90-year-old mother-in-law's wheelchair.
Under European Union regulations, people may import an unlimited quantity of alcohol and tobacco, so long as it is for their own personal use. Had Mr Evans been driving his van himself, he would probably have had no trouble. Cases like this are putting Customs and Excise's considerable powers under scrutiny. A recent stinging High Court judgment about another vehicle seizure said, "the mindset of those determining these policies has not embraced the world of an internal market where excise goods can move freely across internal frontiers." And, on September 18th, the EU announced that it was giving Britain two months to prove that customs officers were not breaching consumers' rights to shop freely in Europe. "Cross-border shopping...is a fundamental right under EU law and should not be regarded as a form of tax evasion," said Frits Bolkestein, the internal market commissioner.
Customs officers have an impossible job. Excise duty and VAT on a pack of premium brand cigarettes account for 79% of the recommended retail selling price of £4.51. An identical pack costs £1.97 in Belgium. One in every five cigarettes smoked in Britain--some 17 billion altogether--has been smuggled. The Tobacco Manufacturers' Association reckons that 80% of hand-rolling tobacco is smuggled.
The main weapon Customs and Excise has in tackling abuse is to seize cars in which it suspects goods are being smuggled. Guidelines suggest "personal use" can mean only up to 800 cigarettes, for example. Anyone bringing in more can be asked to explain. In the past three years, customs officers have impounded more than 22,000 vehicles. Tellingly, only a fifth of seizures are contested, and fewer than 1% of appeals are successful. Officials say the value of cross-channel smuggling has fallen sharply in the past year, from £1.6 billion to £400m.
Some customs officers, though, have clearly been over-zealous. And the recent High Court case ruled that the legislation under which Customs and Excise operates wrongly reverses the burden of proof. The defendant must prove that he is not bringing in tobacco and so forth for a commercial purpose. It also said that customs officers must have "reasonable grounds" for searches: suspicion and instinct are not enough. The government is appealing.
The minister in charge of Customs and Excise, John Healey, accepts that there is an urgent need to respond to questions about the "legitimacy" of the Customs regime. But he says the charge that Customs are abusing their powers is wrong: "Customs," he says, "never stop at random, they never do blanket searches. They always have some ground for stopping people." Tell that to Mr Evans.
Economist; 9/21/2002, Vol. 3 Issue 8291, p52-53, 2p
10、 Free thinkers
Can free source-code stop Microsoft?
FOCUS on what you do best. This age-old strategy has worked well for RealNetworks, Microsoft's main competitor in multimedia software for the Internet. Now, the smaller Seattle-based firm is trying a novel way to contain the software giant. On October 29th, it released the underlying recipe, or source-code, of its RealPlayer software and will soon do the same for its other programs--giving away a big chunk of its intellectual property.
This may sound like a desperate echo of 1998, when Netscape, struggling in Microsoft's chokehold, published the source-code of its web browser (an initiative that yielded few real results until this June, when the first serious new version of the open-source browser, Mozilla, was released). Yet RealNetworks is not playing defence. It is trying to encourage the creation of a common multimedia software infrastructure for every kind of file format and device, thus thwarting Microsoft's ambitions in this promising market.
The firm hopes that others in the industry (volunteer programmers, media firms and hardware makers) will take the code, called Helix DNA, improve it and make it run on new devices, such as mobile phones and home stereos, turning RealNetworks' software into an industry standard. Clever licensing terms are supposed to ensure that this standard does not splinter and that the firm still makes money.
Individual developers, universities and other non-profit organisations can modify the software as they please, and even redistribute it for free, so long as they also publish the source-code for their changes. This is a sort of payment in kind, for RealNetworks is then allowed to use these contributions. Firms, on the other hand, must pay royalty fees if they distribute more than 1m copies of the code. They also have to make sure that their software works with other Helix DNA products. The software's development community already has 2,000 members. And several hardware makers back the effort. But there are risks. Afraid of piracy, media groups are suspicious of anything that might be related to hackers (although they also do not want to depend on, and pay for, technology controlled by Microsoft). The self-created competition could also hurt RealNetworks if customers decide its commercial products, which will be based on the open source-code but with extra features, are not worth paying extra for.
RealNetworks' move is another sign that the software industry is going hybrid. Mixing elements of proprietary software, where the source-code is tightly controlled, with open-source programs enables firms to expand a market, harvest the ideas of others and, they hope, still make money. Even Microsoft is edging this way: it recently announced that partners can now look at--but not modify or re-use--the source-code for Passport, its controversial digital-identity service.
11 、ONE STEP FORWARD, ONE STEP BACK
At last, GM bags Daewoo Motor. But Hynix eludes capture
THE government is desperate to sell the most troubled of South Korea's big companies to foreigners. This, ministers believe, is the best way to accelerate the corporate restructuring begun in the wake of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, and to clear the way for more sustainable economic growth. This week, after months of on-off talks with foreign suitors, the government's plans moved a big step forward, and then an equally big step back.
On April 30th General Motors (GM) signed a contract to buy the bankrupt Daewoo Motor. But on the same day, the board of Hynix, a cash-strapped memory-chip giant, shocked the markets by rejecting a proposed takeover by Micron Technology, an American competitor. Micron had offered to pay about $3.4 billion for Hynix's core memory business, and to take a minority stake in the non-memory arm. Analysts predict that the government will put pressure on creditors to rescue a deal with Micron or seek a new buyer, as liquidation is too risky to contemplate in an election year.
GM's deal with Daewoo Motor marks the end of an even longer and more painful process. Ford almost bought the car maker two years ago, but pulled out after deciding that Daewoo would be too hard to turn round. GM had been talking with Daewoo for over a year. It has agreed to buy two of the company's four domestic car plants, a factory in Vietnam, a parts unit in the Netherlands and nine overseassales arms (all in Europe except one, in Puerto Rico of all places). Between them, the two domestic factories can churn out a combined 530,000 cars and 30,000 commercial vehicles a year.
GM has struck a good deal. Together with various undisclosed partners, it will hold a 67% stake in a new company, tentatively named GM-Daewoo. The American car maker will pay $251m for its own stake of 42%, but it will also assume $573m of Daewoo Motor's debts. The acquisition is a key part of GM's global expansion. The company has been trying to strengthen its foothold in Asia for some time. Buying a presence in South Korea was seen as particularly urgent, since imports account for only 3% of the 1.5m cars sold in the country each year. GM hopes to use Daewoo's production lines to make budget cars that will be sold under the Daewoo brand in most markets.
But GM has much work to do to rebuild Daewoo's damaged brand image and domestic market share, which hovers around 10% after reaching a high of 37% in 1998. GM has to fill holes in product lines by introducing sport-utility and multi-purpose vehicles, says Nick Reilly, former chief executive of Vauxhall, GM's British subsidiary, and chief-executive-designate of GM-Daewoo now that he has sealed the deal. His management team can expect trouble from South Korea's aggressive unions along the way. In a sign of things to come, the signing ceremony was moved to a secret location after a group of union activists occupied the hotel where it was due to take place.
12、 Giving Credit Where Credit Is Not Due
The big identity-theft bust last week was just a taste of what's to come. Here's how to protect your good name
HERE'S THE SCARY THING about the identity-theft ring that the feds cracked last week: there was nothing any of its estimated 40,000 victims could have done to prevent it from happening. This was an inside job, according to court documents. A lowly help-desk worker at Teledata Communications, a software firm that helps banks access credit reports online, allegedly stole passwords for those reports and sold them to a group of 20 thieves at $60 a pop. That allowed the gang to cherry-pick consumers with good credit and apply for all kinds of accounts in their names. Cost to the victims: $3 million and rising.
Even scarier is that this, the largest identity-theft bust to date, is just a drop in the bit bucket. More than 700,000 Americans have their credit hijacked every year. It's one of crime's biggest growth markets. A name, address and Social Security number--which can often be found on the Web--is all anybody needs to apply for a bogus line of credit. Credit companies make $1.3 trillion annually and lose less than 2% of that revenue to fraud, so there's little financial incentive for them to make the application process more secure. As it stands now, it's up to you to protect your identity.
The good news is that there are plenty of steps you can take. Most credit thieves are opportunists, not well-organized gangs. A lot of them go Dumpster diving for those millions of "pre-approved" credit-card mailings that go out every day. Others steal wallets and return them, taking only a Social Security number. Shredding your junk mail and leaving your Social Security card at home can save a lot of agony later.
But the most effective way to keep your identity clean is to check your credit reports once or twice a year. There are three major credit-report outfits: Equifax (at equifax.com), Trans-Union (www.transunion.com) and Experian (experian.com). All allow you to order reports online, which is a lot better than wading through voice-mail hell on their 800 lines. Of the three, I found TransUnion's website to be the cheapest and most comprehensive--laying out state-by-state prices, rights and tips for consumers in easy-to-read fashion.
If you're lucky enough to live in Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey or Vermont, you are entitled to one free report a year by law. Otherwise it's going to cost $8 to $14 each time. Avoid services that offer to monitor your reports year-round for about $70; that's $10 more than the going rate among thieves. If you think you're a victim of identity theft, you can ask for fraud alerts to be put on file at each of the three credit-report companies. You can also download a theft-report form at www.consumer.gov/idtheft, which, along with a local police report, should help when irate creditors come knocking. Just don't expect justice. That audacious help-desk worker was one of the fewer than 2% of identity thieves who are ever caught.
13、 SALLIE KRAWCHECK
CEO of Citigroup's new Smith Barney unit
AS A TRACK STAR in high school, Sallie Krawcheck ranked among her state's best at the high jump. But she hasn't jumped for anyone since, and her unshakable independence has propelled her career on Wall Street to heights unimaginable to a girl coming of age in Charleston, S.C., in the 1970s. Then, Krawcheck--always an outstanding student--thought mostly of cheerleading and "dating the coolest boy," she acknowledges. "She was in danger of becoming terminally cute," recalls her high school guidance counselor, Nancy Wise, who recognized Krawcheck's potential early and stoked her business ambitions. Today Krawcheck, 37, is one of the most powerful women in the corporate world and a rising star.
How far she climbs depends on how well she meets her latest challenge: closing the credibility gap at financial-services giant Citigroup, after government inquiries put a cloud over the firm's reputation--and its stock. Krawcheck was hired in October from the independent stock-research firm Sanford C. Bernstein (where she was CEO) to be Citi's designated savior. Citigroup's proud CEO, Sanford Weill, personally wooed her, reorganizing a large chunk of Citi around her. Krawcheck is now CEO of a reconstituted Smith Barney, which encompasses Citi's stock-research and retail-brokerage operations.
This large stage leaves Krawcheck outwardly undaunted. She's relaxed and confident, with a self-deprecating sense of humor. She says she's "incredibly insecure," and has had nightmares in which she fails to win the respect of her new colleagues. But this soft-spoken humility belies a toughness present from the start. Daughter of a lawyer and sister of three more, Krawcheck learned early on to substantiate her assertions--or keep quiet.
"It used to get quite interesting around the dinner table," says her father Lenny, who practices law in Charleston. "Politics, relationships--you name it. It was every man for himself and awful tough to make your point." Jokes Sallie: "None of us could get a friend to come over for dinner."
Krawcheck earned a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina and an M.B.A. from Columbia University. She went to work at Salomon Brothers but soon moved to Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, where she met her husband Gary Appel. In 1994 Krawcheck moved to Bernstein and dived into stock research. She began covering financial-services firms in 1997 and immediately became the most influential analyst in that field. During those years, Krawcheck earned Weill's ire--and respect when she was later proved correct--by dwelling on the pitfalls of Weill's acquisition of Salomon
14 、WIELDING THE AXE
Investment banks cut with a vengeance
THE 25,000 or so jobs cut by international investment banks so far this year have been presented as judicious pruning, though they were really more panicky than that. Privately, the banks admit that, if business does not pick up soon, then the serious axe-wielding will have to start, on Wall Street and in the City of London. Some banks would have liked to act more aggressively before now, but were restrained by a desire not to be first with the bad news. This week's announcement of 3,500 fresh job losses at Citigroup, followed immediately by reports that J.P. Morgan Chase is about to slash its investment-banking operations, may mark the point at which the blood really starts to flow.
As they decide whom to shed, executives face a tricky question. How quickly might they be able to hire workers in the event that business recovers faster than most people now dare hope? Merrill Lynch suffered badly after it fired workers, including technical staff, as financial markets stumbled in late 1998. When the markets rebounded soon after, not only were these workers loth to return, but employees at other firms would not join a firm that had shown itself to be a fickle employer.
Today, worries about "doing a Merrill" are fading fast. Jobless investment bankers are legion, though few are willing to admit to being "unemployed". New York now has nearly as many "resting" bankers as actresses, though they do not yet have to wait at tables. Senior executives are being fired at a rate not seen since 1990, says Laura Lofaro of Sterling Resources, a firm of head-hunters. They are paid so much that the revenues they bring in for the firm fall short of their pay--even before other overheads are taken into account.
Banks are also eagerly searching out ways to shed workers through increasing use of technology. Curiously, firms like Merrill Lynch may view electronic brokerage with greater enthusiasm now than at the height of the online investing fad. Goldman Sachs has sought efficiencies by centralising its human-resources activities, cutting staff. It came as a shock to learn that Goldman Sachs had 300 human-resource professionals to fire. But when even personnel people are being canned, times really are hard.
The task facing investment banks is complicated by the consequences of their behaviour during the stockmarket boom of blessed memory. For instance, many bankers, notably in equity underwriting and analysis, were recruited on lucrative contracts with several years of guaranteed salary and bonus. Attempts to negotiate release from these guarantees are taking place--notably at CSFB, which handed out more of these contracts than most.
No investment-banking activity has been more idle this year than underwriting initial public offerings (IPOs). The bursting of the Internet bubble has scared off punters and, for another year at least, there are unlikely to be many IPO candidates with a record of profitability (now regarded as essential). Yet job losses in this business have been remarkably low. Could this have anything to do with the way regulators and law firms are courting disaffected and former employees who might be willing to dish the dirt on their bank's abuses of the IPO process?
15 、OPTIONS AHOY
Why investors like Korean blue chips
DESPITE the world economic downturn, South Korea's stockmarket has this year outperformed those of all other countries bar Russia. Its composite stock price index (Kospi) has risen by more than 25% since January 1st. The rally, which has been driven by foreign buying, is expected to continue next year, for two reasons: encouraging economic fundamentals, and the introduction of derivatives so beloved of the world's hedge funds.
On January 28th next year the Korea Stock Exchange is due to introduce option contracts on the shares of seven listed companies: SK Telecom, Korea Electric Power, Korea Telecom, Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor, Pohang Iron & Steel and Kookmin Bank. And as early as July, the Financial Supervisory Commission is expected to allow investment banks to sell over-the-counter derivatives, such as equity or interest-rate swaps. Trading volume on the exchange will increase accordingly, says Lee Wonki at Merrill Lynch. Foreigners hold nearly 90 trillion won ($70 billion) of Korean shares, 37% of the market. Their slice of the trading of Kospi 200 index futures and options rose to 10% this year, from about 5% a year ago. But the Kospi index, covering 200 companies, is not the best way to hedge foreign portfolios, which are invested mainly in the seven blue-chip shares. Yet derivatives alone will not sustain Korean equities unless the economy turns around. There are signs that it has reached bottom, with real GDP estimated to have grown by at least 2.8% this year (slower than last year but higher than earlier forecasts of 2% or less). Jin Nyum, the finance minister, predicts that, although exports may suffer next year if the Japanese yen continues to fall, domestic demand and public spending will help real GDP to grow near to the country's full potential of 5%.
Some analysts argue that the recent market rise has been caused by investors' blind faith in bank and technology shares. The latter rallied last month, but then hesitated as Micron, an American memory-chip maker, blew hot and cold on taking a stake in or allying with Hynix, Korea's debt-laden maker of memory chips.
Nevertheless, the rally is likely to continue, says Koh Wonjong, of SG Securities in Seoul. That is because South Korea's industries are more diversified--into information technology, cars, shipbuilding, steel and services--than those of other Asian countries. In Taiwan, telecoms, media and technology shares account for 80% of the market.
The restructuring of some big companies, such as Hynix and Daewoo Motor, remains incomplete, as does bank reform. But the past four years of financial and corporate change may soon pay off. For many companies, balance-sheet problems have turned into the need to measure profits, a far more welcome task.
16、 Clattering over a moonscape
The great railway revival
THE train was running late, but the 35 aboriginal children who had travelled for two hours through the South Australian desert to meet it did not seem to mind. It was, after all, Australia’s and one of the world’s most unusual train journeys. When the Indian Pacific passenger train finally ground to a halt at Watson, a siding on Australia’s transcontinental line, the children burst into a rendition of a Spanish Christmas song, "Feliz Navidad", as Father Christmas disembarked to distribute gifts.
Watson is a red desert moonscape on the Nullarbor Plain at the eastern end of the world’s longest stretch of straight rail track, 478km (297 miles). This is a mere one-tenth of the 4,352km, three-day journey the train was making between Sydney on Australia’s east coast and Perth on the west coast. The Indian Pacific and its predecessors, such as the Tea and Sugar Train that took provisions to isolated outback communities, were once symbols of Australia’s conquest of its vast distances. But by the 1990s, air travel and the neglect of Australia’s railways by their federal and state-government owners almost killed the last east-west passenger train.
After threatening to close the loss-making Indian Pacific, the federal government in Canberra sold it and the Ghan, another outback passenger train, to Great Southern Railway (GSR), a British-owned private consortium, in 1997. GSR has now turned a first-year loss of A$20m ($15m) into a small operating profit by restoring rolling stock, hiring young, multi-skilled, non-unionised crews and re-marketing the trains to locals and tourists alike. One innovation was to send the Indian Pacific on a whistle-stop Christmas run taking gifts and music to the outback. This year’s journey, the fifth, with impromptu concerts at remote sidings by Jimmy Barnes, an Australian rock star, drew the biggest crowds so far. Broken Hill, a town in western New South Wales struggling since its big silver, lead and zinc mine started winding down, now relies on the Indian Pacific’s tourist passengers for economic lifeblood.
The Ghan’s revival on the north-south transcontinental line has been even more remarkable. The 65,000-plus passengers it carried through the Northern Territory in 2004 were 60% more than in the previous year. Public interest grew after the opening of a new line between Alice Springs and Darwin, allowing people to make the two-day journey from Adelaide by rail for the first time. GSR plans to double the Ghan’s frequency in 2005.
The railway revival still has inefficiencies to overcome. The Indian Pacific competes for space on the single track with trains that carry 80% of the freight between Australia’s east and west coasts. Though most of the line is straight and flat, speed limitations mean this is not a journey for anyone in a hurry.
17 Ripe
America's bond markets are due for scrutiny--and competition
CURIOUSLY, bonds were the first products traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) back in 1792. It took the exchange 30 years to put the "stock" in its name. The exchange lost any significant stake in the bond business generations ago. Now, though, caught in a war over the cost of trading shares, the NYSE quite rightly is looking at other markets with fatter spreads. And its attention has settled on old haunts. It has begun talks with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over permission to trade thousands of unlisted corporate bonds.
The obvious attraction of the bond market is its size: some $10 trillion-worth of corporate bonds traded in 2003, a quarter more than the trading volume on the NYSE. And yet the bond market's size and maturity ought to mean that there are no rich pickings left. It has been hard, though, to tell how efficient bond markets are. In contrast to equities, information on the price of dealing in bonds has been scarce.
That began to change two years ago when the National Association of Securities Dealers began collecting transaction prices. This month the SEC released a study, based on these data, by its own Amy Edwards and Michael Piwowar, and Lawrence Harris of the University of Southern California. For all but the largest investors, trading bonds is many times more expensive than trading stocks. This is odd. In theory bonds should be no more expensive to trade than equities.
Even before sales commissions, the spread between what investors receive when selling $20,000-worth of corporate bonds and what they pay when buying is about 1.4%, or about one-quarter of a year's return. Costs are still higher in the convertible-bond market. And in the municipal-bond market, the spread reaches 2%, according to a similar study published by the SEC in the summer. All told, this is at least four times as expensive as a typical retail equity trade. The prices of most corporate bonds are reported soon after trading. But for the portion of the corporate-bond market where prices are still not required to be reported, a $2 trillion segment in 2003, the study reckons investors paid an additional $1 billion in trading costs.
When trades are reported through the NASD, according to the study, trading costs fall by 10% to 14%. And that is only a start, because the NASD system is glacially slow, reporting prices with a 30-minute delay. Meanwhile, only dealers know where the market is trading. With immediate disclosure, says Mr Harris, transaction costs would undoubtedly fall farther. The benefits, he notes, would not be just to investors but to companies, because lower sales costs would make their debt more attractive to buyers. Bond dealers have long resisted efforts to shine a light on their markets. The study indicates why. For the NYSE, opportunity knocks.
18、Interest rates Just a little tighter
Aug 5th 2004
From The Economist print edition
The Bank is raising rates, but slowly
AS EXPECTED, on August 5th, the Bank of England took a further step to cool Britain's booming economy by increasing the base interest rate from 4.5% to 4.75%, the fifth such increase since November.
Some economic commentators, including the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, had called for a half-point increase—the first of its kind since the Bank of England gained its independence—to shock consumers into more prudent behaviour. However, faced with a welter of conflicting data, the Bank has preferred to stick with the gradualism outlined in a speech last week by the Bank's chief economist, Charlie Bean.
Mr Bean argued that while fears of a £1 trillion debt “time bomb” had been overdone, “uncertainty about the reaction of house prices and of the response of highly indebted households to higher interest rates also suggests a cautious approach.” But financial markets are betting that rates will rise again soon to 5%.
The Bank is worried about overshooting if the economy has already begun to slow. The trouble is that the available evidence is very mixed. This week, the British Retail Consortium's shop price index showed that prices had fallen by 0.7% in July, bringing annual inflation down to 1.2%—hardly consistent with the overheating consumer demand.
. Against that, official retail sales figures are still showing stronger growth than the Bank feels comfortable with.
Accounts of what's going on in the housing market are similarly inconsistent. On August 4th, the nation's biggest mortgage lender, the Halifax, reported that house prices had risen 1.3% in July compared with 1.2% the month before. According to the Halifax, in the year to July, houses rose by 22.1%. By contrast, housebuilders, such as Taylor Woodrow and Wimpey, think that prices are rising at between 6% and 3%. The estate agents' website, rightmove.co.uk, claims that asking prices （要价） are actually falling—by 1.3% in London during the last three weeks of July and by 0.5% across the rest of the country.
Less ambiguous proof that the economy is growing rapidly came this week from the CIPS-Reuters purchasing managers' index （英国特许采购和供应协会(Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply)） for manufacturing. This barometer showed that manufacturing industry is enjoying its strongest expansion for nearly a decade. If, as is probable, GDP is growing at nearly 1.5 points above its trend rate of about 2.5%, it will not be long before the output gap is fully closed. Once that happens, inflation can be expected to pick up, putting into jeopardy the Bank's 2% Consumer Price Index target. With oil prices also moving sharply upwards again, the Bank will have to apply another touch on the brakes again soon.
19、The gambling industry
The wheel of fortune
Sep 22nd 2005 | LAS VEGAS From The Economist print edition
America's booming casinos
CLEARLY you should never bet against Mother Nature—witness the cost of Hurricane Katrina to America's gambling industry: a string of casinos along Mississippi's Gulf coast in ruins and 14,000 employees out of work. So why is the American Gaming Association (AGA), which celebrated its tenth anniversary last week in the hurricane-proof glitter of Las Vegas, so upbeat?
The answer is that an industry which used to be a by-word for racketeering has cleaned up its act and is more profitable than ever. Today it is run by quoted corporations instead of the Mob and is confident of winning public acceptance.
Last year some 54.1m people—more than a quarter of American adults—visited a casino, on average six times each. Poker is a particular growth area. Some 18% of American adults played poker last year, a 50% increase over the previous year. Together, the country's 445 commercial casinos (a definition excluding casinos owned by Indian tribes) had revenues of nearly $29 billion and paid state gaming taxes of $4.74 billion, almost 10% more than in 2003. A survey of 201 elected officials and civic leaders (not including any from gambling-dependent Nevada and New Jersey) found that 79% believed casinos had had a positive impact on their communities.
But could the industry's lucky streak run out? The AGA's president, Frank Fahrenkopf, a former chairman of the Republican Party, points to two potential problems: fears of the social impact of gambling—especially crime and addiction (quaintly termed “disordered gambling”)—and increased tax rates.
Not surprisingly, the AGA pooh-poohs the notion that the social costs of gambling outweigh its benefits in providing amusement, employment and taxable revenue. It points to the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, which in 1999 concluded that a mere 0.6% of America's adult population had serious problems with gambling. Maybe so, but Focus on the Family, a leading conservative organisation, counters that the gambling industry managed to get three members of the Nevada casino industry and one representative of Indian gambling interests on to the nine-member commission—and, even so, the commission concluded that “pathological gambling is found proportionately more often among the young, less educated, and poor”.
On tax, the industry argues that states that levy a lower tax on gambling actually receive larger tax revenues—and a comparison between low-tax Nevada and New Jersey, and high-tax New York seems to support the argument. But emotion also comes into play—“sin taxes” are popular. Mr Fahrenkopf complains that the media “in this country is vehemently anti-gaming, even in this town [Las Vegas]”.
Looking ahead, however, the odds are surely with the industry. A more welcoming regulatory climate and the huge potential of internet gambling signal higher profits ahead. As one American comic once put it: “Betting is pretty much like liquor: you can make it illegal but you cannot make it unpopular.”
20、Alternative fuels
A tankful of sugar
Sep 22nd 2005 | HORTOLÂNDIA AND SÃO PAULO From The Economist print edition
Has Brazil found the answer to high petrol prices?
WHILE motorists elsewhere fret about high fuel prices, new-car buyers in Brazil can feel smug. They can fill up with petrol, ethanol (alcohol) or any combination of the two. And right now, ethanol is up to 55% cheaper at the pump in Brazil than regular gasoline.
Brazilians are the beneficiaries of an automotive revolution: “flex-fuel” cars that run as readily on ethanol as on regular petrol were introduced in 2003, and have since grabbed nearly two-thirds of the market. In America some 4.5m vehicles can run on blends of up to 85% ethanol, but that fuel is available only in Minnesota. In Brazil ethanol is everywhere, thanks to a 30-year-old policy of promoting fuel derived from home-grown sugar cane.
Eager for energy independence or lower emissions of greenhouse gases, other countries are now starting to promote “bio-fuels”. But America and Europe favour their own farmers, who produce fuel based on corn or rape-seed that is mainly used as an additive to conventional petrol—and is dirtier and more expensive than Brazil's sugar-based ethanol. So bio-fuelled cars may take years to catch on in other markets.
For Brazil, this is a second try at a failed romance. Prompted by the oil shocks of the 1970s, Brazilian governments used laws and subsidies to promote ethanol-only cars, which had 90% of the market by the late 1980s. But supplies of sugar-based fuel dried up suddenly when planters rushed to meet a surge in demand for sugar. Sales of ethanol-powered cars dropped to nearly zero by 1990—one taxi driver famously set his alight outside Congress.
Flex-fuel cars have persuaded Brazilians to give ethanol a second try. The initiative came from the Brazilian operations of parts suppliers such as Magneti Marelli, owned by Fiat of Italy, and Bosch, a German company. They persuaded the government to extend to flex-fuel cars the tax break previously applied to ethanol-only models. Volkswagen was first to the market, followed quickly by other big manufacturers.
The Brazilian car industry as a whole is struggling. Might exports of flex-fuel cars prove its salvation? Probably not, alas. If the cars become popular outside Brazil, they could easily be made elsewhere. Brazilian parts suppliers are more likely to benefit than car makers. Bosch has sold fuel-supply systems for America's fleet of superfluous flex-fuel cars. Magneti Marelli would probably start by exporting components, but with higher volumes would move towards selling the technology. Brazil's biggest opportunity may be to sell fuel rather than flexibility. Its cost of sugar production is so low that ethanol can compete with petrol even with oil prices at $35 a barrel, about half of today's price.
21、A bank run in Macau
Breaking the bank
Sep 22nd 2005 | MACAU From The Economist print edition
They do more than gamble in Macau
BANK runs don't happen often these days—almost as infrequently as, say, dictators embracing disarmament. But just days before North Korea's tentative conciliatory step this week (see article), a Macau bank found itself in trouble, having been suspected of illegal financial links with the pariah state.
Last weekend, nervous depositors in the former Portuguese colony queued outside branches of Banco Delta Asia. They wanted their money out because on September 15th the American Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) had branded the bank “a willing pawn for the North Korean government to engage in corrupt financial activities”. FinCEN alleges that for 20 years Banco Delta Asia has been providing “financial services”, including circulating counterfeit money and laundering suspicious cash deposits, to North Korean firms linked to the smuggling of drugs, fake tobacco and precious metals. Under particular scrutiny is Zokwang, a trading company that is also, in effect, Macau's North Korean consulate.
Banco Delta Asia calls the accusations “totally unfounded”. Its chairman, Stanley Au, a former gold trader and a Macau legislator, says they are a “ridiculous joke”. He says that the monetary authorities in Macau and Hong Kong have known about the bank's relationship with North Korea for years, but that he has now suspended business with North Korean firms.
Mr Au says too that the money customers withdrew in last weekend's panic—around HK$300m ($38m), or 10% of the bank's deposits—is coming back. An appeal for calm by Macau's leader, Edmund Ho, helped. So has the government's rapid promise to support the bank and its appointment of two representatives to the management team. Meanwhile, Banco Delta Asia has hired a law firm to persuade the Americans to remove it from their money-laundering blacklist, which in effect cuts it off from the international banking system.
Reports say that Bank of China and Seng Heng Bank, controlled by Stanley Ho, a Macau casino billionaire who part-owns a casino in Pyongyang, are also under investigation. Bank of China says it has no knowledge of a probe. Banco Seng Heng's general manager, Robert McBain, says it has no business with North Korean companies or citizens.
Macau's reputation is already fragile, and suggestions that the gangland violence of the 1990s has been replaced by commercial crime do it no favours. FinCEN notes that “money-laundering has been identified as a significant problem in Macau” and chides the ex-colony for failing to pass the anti-laundering laws that it first promised in 2003. One reason for the delay may be a reluctance to slow the flow of money into Macau's economy, which is thriving from a boom in tourism, gambling and property development. Life might be easier for Macau's businessmen if the only people trying to break the former colony's banks were punters in its casinos, not the American government.
22、Investment taxes
Taxing times
Sep 22nd 2005 From The Economist print edition
A study of corporate taxes yields some unexpected results
SWEDEN, a bastion of egalitarianism where the state claims around 60% of GDP, is surprisingly friendly to capitalists. On the other hand, communist China, the darling of foreign investors the world over, demands a great deal from its suitors. Both findings emerge from a new report on capital taxation by Duanjie Chen, Jack Mintz and Finn Poschmann of the C.D. Howe Institute, a Canadian think-tank.
The simplest way of comparing countries' capital taxation would be to look at statutory tax rates on corporate income. But that, says the authors, misses a lot of factors that affect the taxes which firms actually pay. Governments use different rules for the treatment of depreciation, inventories and other things. All of these cause actual tax rates to diverge from the statutory figures.
The authors have calculated a ranking according to the “effective” tax rate—the proportion of the pre-tax return on capital swallowed by the state (see chart). China comes out on top, largely because of a 17% value-added tax on purchases of machinery and equipment. However, lucky firms can sometimes negotiate a full refund, which cuts the effective tax rate from 46% to only 18%.
Canada, America and Germany are also among the top corporate taxers. Although Canada has a lowish statutory tax on corporate income, high capital and sales levies on inputs by its provincial governments lift its effective rate.
Sweden allows fast write-offs for capital investment, which pull its effective tax rate down. Singapore and Hong Kong also offer liberal deductions and concessions that yield more favourable tax regimes.
How important are tax policies in encouraging foreign direct investment? All other things equal, a higher tax rate reduces the return on investment. However, all other things are seldom equal: differences in market size, labour costs, the quality of infrastructure and political stability, among other things, are also important for attracting investment. Foreign investors falling over each other to set up factories in China are plainly not put off by tax.
Still, the authors believe that taxes do matter, and increasingly so for industrialised countries that face stiff competition for investment, especially from the Chinese. In Germany, corporate-income taxes may be on the way down whatever the colours of the next government. Similar pressures may lead America and Canada to cutting their rates as well.
23、Sugar in Mexico
How sweet it isn't
Sep 22nd 2005 | MEXICO CITY From The Economist print edition
Addicted to outmoded regulation
MORE often than not in Mexico, a discussion of politics turns into a discussion of history. So diagnosing the ills of the sugar industry, whose costs are three times higher than in Brazil, starts with the Mexican revolution of 1910-17. This began a process of land redistribution which means that the average sugar-cane farm is only about 4 hectares (10 acres). Add poor roads, and outdated railways and sugar mills, and that is why Mexico's sugar industry is so inefficient, argues Carlos Blackaller, a congressional deputy for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico until 2000.
Mr Blackaller is also the head of one of two unions of sugar-cane growers. According to Juan Cortina of Grupo Azucarero México, a private sugar firm, it is Mr Blackaller and his union who are the main reason sugar prices are so high.
Because plots are small and unmechanised, some 440,000 work in the sugar harvest, according to the union. The result is a bloated, politicised industry, regulated to suit the farmers (who nevertheless remain poor), while making it hard for sugar mills to turn a profit. It is no surprise that Mexico's 58 sugar mills have yo-yoed in and out of public ownership. They are now privatised, for the second time in 15 years.
By law, mills must buy cane at 57% of the market price of refined sugar; and they must buy all the cane from a catchment area around each mill. These rules make it impossible for mills to compete, says Mr Cortina. But after President Vicente Fox threatened to veto a law reaffirming them, union protests brought the centre of Mexico City to a halt for a few days last month. Mr Fox backed down, making only minor changes which were then approved by Congress.
Neither Mexico nor the United States is keen on free trade in sugar. The industry was relegated to a last-minute addendum to the North American Free Trade Agreement. The United States wants to restrict exports of subsidised Mexican sugar, but it wants to export its own subsidised corn syrup (a cheaper substitute for sugar in soft drinks). Last month, the WTO ruled in America's favour, but Mexico still threatens to impose punitive tariffs on imports of corn syrup above a threshold. Mexicans seem certain to have to carry on paying a fortune for their sweet tooth.
24、Canada's economy Of forest and mine
Sep 22nd 2005 | OTTAWA From The Economist print edition
A return to an older pattern of economic growth
CHINA has long held powerful sway over Canada's development. The country was explored by Europeans seeking a passage to Cathay. Trade with the Orient, rather than a desire to build a nation, elicited private money for Canada's transcontinental railway. Now, once again, China—or at least the commodities boom prompted by its industrialisation—is reshaping Canada's economy. The engines of growth in the 1990s—cars and high-tech industries—have slowed or shrunk. In their place, dowdy perennials, such as mining, have become the new stars. “The economy has just been flipped on its head,” says Philip Cross, the chief economic analyst at Statistics Canada.
Natural resources, construction and business services (which includes work by architects and engineers) are now the three fastest-growing sectors of the economy. Natural resources, and notably energy, account for more than 60% of Canada's exports (when imported components are subtracted). This is good news for the resource-rich western provinces of Alberta and British Columbia but less so for Ontario, where manufacturing has been hit hard by an appreciation of the Canadian dollar and the continuing troubles of the North American carmakers.
The job market has been turned upside down as well. Youths in rural Canada, where jobs are on offer in mines, oilfields and forests, are now less likely to be unemployed than their urban counterparts. Since 2000, blue-collar work has grown more rapidly than white-collar employment. Workers of all kinds are in short supply in Alberta, where the unemployment rate is about half the national average of 6.8%. The owner of a chain of doughnut shops in the province recently offered workers free iPods, free transport and the chance of a university scholarship if they would just take a job behind the counter.
The soaring price of oil and other commodities has prompted a surge in investment. Some C$46 billion ($39 billion) of new investment was announced earlier this year in Alberta's oil patch alone. Railway lines are being built, ports expanded, and oil and gas pipelines laid. Investment cycles in Canada generally run for seven to ten years. This one is just beginning.
Trade in goods between Canada and China, though growing fast, was still only C$29 billion in 2004 (compared with C$600 billion for two-way trade across the border with the United States). Hu Jintao, China's president, said during a visit to Canada earlier this month that he wanted to see trade double in the next five years. He singled out energy, natural resources, technology and nuclear power as areas of special interest. But China's biggest impact on Canada has been the influence of its headlong economic growth on commodity prices. High prices for commodity exports lifted Canada's trade surplus to a near-record C$66 billion last year.
These economic shifts are not without complications. There is growing tension over how to share out the wealth generated by natural resources. Some Canadian politicians, like their counterparts in Latin America, sniff an opportunity to play China off against the United States, for example by rerouting lumber and energy exports west instead of south. Just what the benefit of doing this would be is unclear.
Foreign-exchange dealers now treat the Canadian dollar as a petrocurrency. That points to its current strength, but raises two fears. One is of eventual bust when oil prices fall. The other is of what economists call “Dutch disease”, a condition in which primary exports lead to a strong currency which squeezes local manufacturers.
Worst of all is the blow to national pride. After decades of trying, Canada seems to have failed to become a whizzy, high-tech economy. Its main exports to China include humdrum chemicals, metals and minerals. Yet the grief seems overdone. After all, it still produces gizmos such as BlackBerrys as well as gas.
25、France and the 35-hour week
Change on the way?
Jul 15th 2004 | PARIS From The Economist print edition
Are they really enjoying their time off?
NOT since nationalization in the early 1980s has a single policy so embodied French wrong-headedness. The 35-hour week, brought in by the Socialists in 2000-02, cut the maximum working week by four hours with no loss of pay. It was meant to create jobs. What has it actually done?
Three points stand out. First, big companies have coped better than small ones, for whom the rules have been eased. But even big firms feel that any benefits have worn off (逐渐减少). Renault (法国雷诺汽车公司) secured flexible working practices—weekend shifts, night work—in return for a shorter week; Caterpillar, a big American firm, moved to seven-day working. But four years on, the complaint is that the policy has destroyed the work ethic and damaged productivity. Insee, a statistics body, says it cut output per head by 5% between 1999 and 2002.
Second, the 35-hour week has created a two-tier labour market. Its chief beneficiaries are not workers, whose pay has been frozen for two or three years. Rather it is the autonomous executives, with their extra days off. And thanks to broader labour-market rigidities employers are using short-term or temporary contracts to gain flexibility. By 2002, some 22% of those under 25 worked on such contracts, up from 13% in 1992.
Third, the promise of job creation was empty. Martine Aubry, architect (倡导者) of the 35-hour week, says it “created 450,000 jobs”. Certainly, the public sector had to create many, at heavy cost. Yet the policy came when the economy was buoyant. The government cut employers' social charges, which would have created more jobs anyway. And France's jobless rate is still nearly 10%—twice that in Britain—and 22% for under-25s.
Is all this sinking in ? A poll in Le Parisien suggests that 51% favour reforming the 35-hour week—if they can earn more. Bosch is negotiating a 36-hour week at its plant near Lyons (里昂,法国名城). Nicolas Sarkozy, the finance minister, is pushing for reform. It may not mean the death of the 35-hour week, which unions would resist. But the wisdom of forgoing (放弃) higher pay for more free time is being questioned.
26、Bargain basement
Jul 15th 2004 | BERLIN From The Economist print edition
The trade unions are left with little room to negotiate
WORKERS at DaimlerChrysler plants in Germany took a “day of action” on July 15th to protest against proposed wage cuts and longer working hours. Yet if the carmaker cannot reduce labour costs by €500m ($600m) a year at its Sindelfingen plant in south-west Germany, it threatens to move production of the C-class Mercedes to Bremen (where staff work slightly longer hours), or to South Africa. This is only one of many poker games being played by German firms with unions as they seek to cut labour costs.
In today's economic climate, the bosses seem to be winning. Last month Siemens got the nod from the biggest blue-collar union, IG Metall, to raise its working week from the standard 35 to an average of 40 hours at two plants near Cologne. The argument was that this would save 2,000 jobs that would otherwise shift to Hungary. Siemens can now impose similar conditions at other plants under threat.
The 35-hour week, established in western Germany in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is still insisted on publicly by IG Metall and Verdi, the biggest white-collar union. But threatened plant closures and other hard-luck stories have forced concessions at, for example, Continental, a tyre company, and ThyssenKrupp, a steelmaker. Volkswagen is preparing for a showdown to cut labour costs by 30%.
Germans work fewer hours per year than workers in any other rich country except the Netherlands and Norway, according to the OECD. At DaimlerChrysler's Sindelfingen plant the workers get a five-minute break every hour. With that and local holidays they work 72 hours less per year than colleagues in Bremen. Lengthening the working week is a less painful way of cutting costs than trimming wages, even if it makes it little easier to find jobs for Germany's 4.4m unemployed.
That challenge is the focus of another labour-market reform that has just passed into law. Hartz IV, as it is called, merges social-security payments with the unemployment-benefit system. That may sound like paper-shuffling but it is, claims Matthias Platzeck, premier of Brandenburg, “the biggest social revolution in Germany since the second world war.” From January, the long-term unemployed, whose lives have been too cushy, will find the tap turned off if another household member is in work, or they have too many assets, or they are unwilling to take jobs offered.
It will be hard for any of these measures to make a big difference in places with high unemployment: in eastern Germany, for instance, average unemployment is 18.5% and there are areas where it is closer to 30%. But everywhere, say the polls, there is a growing readiness to be flexible to save jobs, including working longer hours. Perhaps not as long as Jürgen Kluge, who heads the German arm of McKinsey, and recently claimed to work between 70 and 80 hours a week. But the relentless fall in hours worked in Germany seems likely to be reversed over the next few years.
27、Damned lies and statistics
Making sense of numbers
Jan 6th 2005 From The Economist print edition
CHARTS rear up in the best and worst publications, from doctoral theses to the tabloid press. Yet the concept of drawing a graph from empirical data is a relatively recent phenomenon. Howard Wainer nominates William Playfair as the father of "modern graphical display". Playfair, something of a ne'er-do-well, Mr Wainer maintains, was a Scottish draughtsman for James Watt. By producing an "atlas" of Britain in 1786-44 charts, no maps-Playfair demonstrated that the presentation of evidence could have a beauty all its own. (The Economist began using charts only in the late 1920s, though it was a heavy user of data from its first issue in 1843.)
In his personalised and readable jaunt through the history of charting over the next couple of centuries, Mr Wainer introduces a varied cast of characters. They include Thomas Jefferson, who drew a chart of vegetable supply in the Washington, DC, market during 1802, John Tukey, the developer of exploratory data analysis, and Edward Tufte, arguably the best-known of current writers on visual display.
A statistics professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Mr Wainer also underlines possible pitfalls in graph production. As examples, he gives irregular time periods, broken scales and alphabetical rather than ranked ordering.
In similar fashion, Jane Miller, an academic at Rutgers University who trained as a demographer, warns against common charting errors. Hers, much more a textbook, is clearly written, with a checklist at the end of each chapter, invaluable for students. It should be required reading for journalists and politicians.
Data need a context: a figure or two tells you little. The fundamental questions of journalism-who, what, when and where-have to be answered in charts too. Although Ms Miller's book is chiefly concerned with writing about numbers, the last chapter gives advice about speaking with numbers. In presentations using visual aids, she says, use no more than one slide a minute.
The core of Joel Best's sequel to his popular "Damned Lies and
Statistics" is how numbers can be used to confuse public issues. Mr Best, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, looks first at missing, confusing and scary numbers. He moves on to authoritative, magical and contentious numbers, and throughout takes particular aim at figures used in the public domain. Pithy examples abound, such as the 150 people allegedly killed annually by coconuts, even though no one has actually made a tally. At the end, he examines the chances of teaching statistical literacy to a wider audience, arguing that "when everyone's numbers come under
28、The dollar Further to fall
Dec 29th 2004 From The Economist print edition
A new year is likely to bring a new low for the dollar
THE dollar ended the year as it began: heading downhill. It hit a new low against the euro, below $1.36, on December 28th. Against the yen, it was steadier: ￥103, slightly stronger than in late November. The yen has risen by less than the euro because, although the Bank of Japan has not intervened in the foreign-exchange markets since March, the bank looks more likely to act than the European Central Bank. Japan's finance minister, Sadakazu Tanigaki, gave
warning this week that his country's authorities would monitor foreign-exchange markets over the New Year holiday. In contrast, Gerrit Zalm, the Dutch finance minister, suggested that the euro's rise so far was acceptable.
Since early 2002 the dollar has lost 37% against the euro and 24% against the yen. But it has shed only 16% against the Federal Reserve's broad basket of currencies, because many Asian currencies are pegged or closely tied to the greenback.
The cause of the dollar's decline is hardly a mystery: private investors are less eager to finance
America's huge current-account deficit. The deficit widened slightly in the third quarter of
2004, to a record $165 billion, or 5.6% of GDP. If the deficit remains so big, America's foreign debt burden and hence its debt-service payments will increase sharply.
So far, America's mounting foreign liabilities have not harmed its economy because the rise in its debt in recent years has been offset by lower interest rates. As a result, America still enjoys a net inflow of foreign investment income despite being the world's biggest debtor. But, as interest rates rise, refinancing America's debt will become more costly. Goldman Sachs forecasts that net foreign investment income is likely to shift to a sizeable deficit during 2005, growing thereafter. The investment bank estimates that, if America's current-account deficit remains steady as a share of GDP and interest rates average 5% in future, net foreign debt- service payments will reach 4% of GDP by 2020-a significant drag on American living standards.
By most measures the dollar is already undervalued, but experience suggests that it will need to fall further still to cut the deficit to a sustainable level, say 2-3% of GDP. Capital Economics, a London research firm, forecasts that the dollar will fall to $1.40 against the euro and to ￥90 by the end of 2005. But it expects the dollar to recover against the British pound to $1.82 from
$1.93 today, as British interest rates are cut in the wake of falling house prices.
29、Mobile devices
The real energy crisis
Jan 6th 2005 | NEW YORK From The Economist print edition
How an old technology is constraining a new one
"SEAMLESS mobility is here," trumpet the latest advertisements from Motorola, one of thousands of consumer-electronics companies that converged on Las Vegas this week for the industry's glitzy annual shindig, the Consumer Electronics Show. Like Motorola, many of these companies will be hoping to persuade the show's 130,000 or so attendees that the combination of faster wireless networks, more powerful microchips and better display technology will usher in a new age of dominance for mobile devices. Yet as such devices-which often combine a phone, camera, music player and personal organiser-become more powerful, they are consuming more power. And that is the industry's dirty little secret: battery technology is not keeping pace.
The news that Matsushita, a Japanese consumer-electronics firm, plans to launch a new sort of disposable battery technology (called Oxyride) in America and Europe illustrates the point. Matsushita's engineers have spent eight years working on their new battery, yet it lasts only
50% longer than an ordinary disposable battery. The technology behind the rechargeable lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries that power mobile phones and laptops is not evolving much more speedily. According to unpublished research by the Boston Consulting Group, the amount of energy that a battery can store (its energy density) is growing by 8% a year.
Mobile-device power consumption, meanwhile, is growing at more than three times this rate, as backlit colour screens, high-speed wireless networks and more powerful microprocessors draw ever-larger amounts of power.
This growing gap between the supply (energy density) and demand for energy (see chart) is an indicator of the severity of the trade-offs which device-makers and consumers may have to make as battery technology increasingly constrains the evolution of mobile devices. Demand
continues to grow rapidly, especially as mobile operators upgrade to new high-speed networks,
which require more powerful handsets. Eventually, a new technology, such as miniature fuel cells, may solve the mobile-energy crisis. Until then, consumers will face stark choices.
Some may be willing to recharge their devices more frequently. Battery life has already plummeted for certain devices. Musea, an all-in-one mobile device built to run on NTT DoCoMo's fast, power-hungry third-generation mobile network, advertises just 40 minutes of talk time with its screen fully lit. At airports, business travellers are increasingly to be found squatting beside inconveniently-placed power outlets, desperate to recharge phones and laptops before they board their flight. Some consumers have already learned to avoid power- hungry features such as video calling. Others are opting instead to lug extra battery packs around with them. Alarmingly, the American army's "Future Force Warrior" programme has calculated that the soldier of the future may have to hump around the battlefield batteries weighing 34lb (15kg) to power his high-tech combat kit. That is one feature of the seamlessly mobile future that Motorola-the proud maker of the networked motorbike helmet and snowboarding jacket-will be happy to gloss over.
30、Ageing
The stronger sex
Jan 13th 2005 From The Economist print edition
Why do women live longer than men?
WOMEN live longer than men. It is unfair, but true. In developed countries, the average difference is five or six years. In the poor world the gap is smaller, owing to the risks of childbirth. But nowhere is it absent. The question is, why?
That question can be answered at two levels. An evolutionary biologist would tell you that it is because women get evolutionary bonus points from living long enough to help bring up the grandchildren. Men, by contrast, wear themselves out competing for the right to procreate in the first place. That is probably true, but not much help to the medical profession. However, a group of researchers at John Moores University, in Liverpool, England, has just come up with a medically useful answer. It is that while 70-year-old men have the hearts of 70-year-olds, those of their female peers resemble the hearts of 20-year-olds.
David Goldspink, who revels in the title of Professor of Cell and Molecular Sports Science at John Moores, and his colleagues looked at 250 volunteers aged between 18 and 80 over the course of two years. All the volunteers were healthy but physically inactive. The team's principal finding was that the power of the male heart falls by 20-25% between the ages of 18 and 70, while that of the female heart remains undiminished.
Each volunteer's heart function was measured before exercise and at peak exertion on a treadmill. In particular, the researchers measured blood flow and blood pressure. Their subjects were also given an ultrasonic scan to measure the size of the chambers of their hearts, the thickness of the heart's muscular wall, and its filling and emptying actions.
The researchers found that between the ages of 20 and 70, men lose one-third of the contractile muscle cells in the walls of their hearts. Over the same period, women lose hardly any contractile cells. There is a strong link between the number of these cells and the function of the heart. What remains a mystery is why men lose these cells and women do not.
A previous theory of why women outlive men suggested that the female sex hormone, oestrogen, could have a protective effect on the heart. But Dr Goldspink dismisses this idea, saying that there is no discernible drop-off in female heart function after menopause, when oestrogen levels decrease dramatically. However, oestrogen does have a beneficial effect on blood vessels. The study found that blood flow to the muscles and skin of the limbs decreases with age in both sexes. The changes in the structure of the blood vessels occur earlier in men, but women catch up soon after menopause.
It's not all bad news for men, though. In a related study, the team found that the hearts of veteran male athletes were as powerful as those of inactive 20-year-old male undergraduates. But can men really recover lost heart function after a lifetime of inactivity and poor diet? Is it ever too late to start exercising? "I think the answer is no," says Dr Goldspink. "The health benefits to be gained from sensible exercise are to be recommended, regardless of age." So if you are male and getting on, get on with it.
31、GM crops
Greener than you thought
Jan 20th 2005 From The Economist print edition
Genetically modified sugar beet is good for the environment
THOUGH often conflated in the public mind, arguments against the planting of genetically modified (GM) crops fall into two distinct groups. One, which applies only to food crops, is that they might, for some as yet undemonstrated reason, be harmful to those who eat them. The other, which applies to them all, is that they might be bad for the environment.
Proponents of the technology counter that in at least some cases GM crops should actually be good for the environment. Crops that are modified to produce their own insecticides should require smaller applications of synthetic pesticides of the sort that Greens generally object to. But in the case of those modified to resist herbicides the argument is less clear-cut. If farmers do not have to worry about poisoning their own crops, environmentalists fear, they will be more gung-ho about killing the wild plants that sit at the bottom of the food chain and keep rural ecosystems going-or weeds, as they are more commonly known.
Research just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society suggests, however, that it may be possible for all to have prizes. Get the dose and timing right and you can have a higher crop yield and a higher weed yield at the same time-and also use less herbicide.
The research was done at Broom's Barn Research Station in Suffolk, by a team led by Mike May, the head of the station's weeds group. The team was studying GM sugar beet. This was one of the species examined in the British government's Farm-Scale Evaluations (FSEs) project, a huge, three-year-long research programme designed to assess the effects (including the environmental effects) of herbicide use on GM crops.
The results for sugar beet, which competes badly with common weed species and thus relies heavily on the application of herbicides for its success, came in for particular criticism from environmentalists when the trials concluded in 2003. They indicated that fields planted with GM beet and treated with glyphosate, the herbicide against which the modification in question protects, had fewer weeds later in the season. These produced fewer seeds and thus led to reduced food supplies for birds. Some invertebrates, particularly insects, were also adversely affected.
The Broom's Barn researchers, however, felt that this problem might be overcome by changing the way the glyphosate was applied. They tried four different treatment "regimes", which varied the timing and method of herbicide spraying, and compared them with conventional
crop-management regimes such as those used in the FSEs.
The best results came from a single early-season application of glyphosate. This increased crop yields by 9% while enhancing weed-seed production up to sixteen-fold. And, as a bonus, it required 43% less herbicide than normal. Genetic modification, it seems, can be good for the environment, as well as for farmers' pockets.
32、eBay
Give us your tired computers
Jan 27th 2005 From The Economist print edition
A new plan to recycle old PCs may forestall regulation
THE computer industry is built on the assumption that PCs and electrical devices are replaced every few years. It is a strategy that leaves tons of electronic junk in its wake. Over 130,000
PCs are replaced every day in America alone, and only a tenth or so are recycled. Ingredients such as cadmium, mercury and lead can do terrible things to people and places. In Europe, such e-waste is the fastest growing type of refuse, accounting for 8% of all municipal rubbish.
Regulators have taken note. In California, legislation to levy a surcharge on computer sales to defray recycling costs took effect this month. (A European Union directive in 2003 requires equipment-makers to recycle, but it has not yet been implemented in national laws.) Manufacturers such as IBM, Dell and HP have been trying to deflect further legislation by introducing their own recycling programmes. But they have had limited success-partly because they tend to charge for recycling unwanted machines. Apple's price for taking back one of its computers in America is $30.
Now eBay, the world's leading online auction business, has come up with an innovative way to encourage people to sell, donate or recycle their old machines over the internet. A web-based program "reads" the redundant computer's components and gives its specifications (like its memory and processor speed). Owners can then ascertain the value of their old PC, put it up for sale and get a special mailing kit to simplify shipping. The site also makes it easy to donate a PC to charity or get it to a nearby recycler.
The scheme is no altruistic act of corporate social responsibility. It began as an attempt by Patrick Jabal, manager of the site's computer and networking category (which does $2.5 billion-worth of transactions a year), to drum up more business.
Watching people's buying and selling patterns on eBay's site, Mr Jabal, an entrepreneur with an MBA from Harvard Business School, noticed an unmet demand for cheap, old PCs. Though
they were plentiful in the closets of eBay users, listing and selling them was problematic. So, in order to increase their supply on the site, he set out to overcome the difficulties that users had-often no more than an inability to remember the vital statistics of the machine they had been using.
Then he stumbled on the issue of waste and realised that the company could do even more. "It was a way to meet a business objective, help the environment, and help confused consumers," he says. It may also turn out to be a clever market-based way to avoid more regulation.
33、The Paris airport disaster
A crushing blow
May 27th 2004 | PARIS From The Economist print edition
The aftershocks from a collapsed airport terminal
EARLY on May 23rd, a 30-metre section of the glass-and-steel roof at terminal 2E of Paris Charles de Gaulle airport collapsed, crushing everything beneath it. Four people were killed; more would have been had it happened at a busier time, or if policemen had not evacuated some 80 people when cracks appeared. The disaster has shaken France. “How was this possible?” asked Le Parisien, above a full-page photo of the collapsed structure. The terminal was opened less than a year ago. Its dashing architecture, like a giant curved earthworm lined with a concrete honeycomb, was widely seen as a showpiece of French engineering and design flair. Airports, said Le Monde, are not just buildings but “shop windows, ambassadors designed to give the whole world the best impression of French savoir-faire.” The collapse was an “earthquake for France's image”.
Until an official inquiry is completed, the precise cause of the collapse will be unclear. Theories range from design faults and construction errors to a rush to finish the job and budget constraints. Paul Andreu, the architect who designed the terminal for Aéroports de Paris (ADP), the state-owned airport company, and Hubert Fontanel, the chief engineer, each confirmed that there had been cracks early on, but insisted that the problems had been resolved. Mr Andreu said candidly that he “didn't think that he'd made a mistake” in the design, and added that the project had been under cost constraints. The possibility that the entire terminal might have to be pulled down has not been ruled out.
This is bad news for ADP. The company has been trying to build up Charles de Gaulle, the world's eighth-biggest airport, as a rival to London's Heathrow and to Frankfurt. The new terminal, with another satellite under construction, is due to serve the Airbus 380, the giant 555-seater aircraft scheduled to begin flying in 2006. ADP has also been winning lucrative design work for airports abroad, including new terminals at Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. Such ambitions may now be open to question, as will government plans to start privatising ADP next year. For Air France, too, the collapse is a setback. The terminal is critical to the airline's efforts to create a hub for its flights and for those of its partner airlines in the Sky Team alliance.
Plainly, the prestige of Paris has taken a knock. But the political fall-out may not be so damaging. The prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, was on the spot soon after the collapse, as was his transport minister, Gilles de Robien. President Jacques Chirac expressed his “profound compassion”. If nothing else, the government has learnt from last summer's heatwave tragedy, when some 15,000 people died but the government was painfully slow to respond.
34、Twin studies, genetics and the environment
Claiming one's inheritance
Aug 12th 2004 | TWINSBURG, OHIO From The Economist print edition
The relationship between genes and experience is becoming better understood.
THE scientific study of twins goes back to the late 19th century, when Francis Galton, an early geneticist, realised that they came in two varieties: identical twins born from one egg and non-identical twins that had come from two. That insight turned out to be key, although it was not until 1924 that it was used to formulate what is known as the twin rule of pathology（ 病理学）, and twin studies really got going.
The twin rule of pathology states that any heritable disease will be more concordant (that is, more likely to be jointly present or absent)in identical twins than in non-identical twins—and, in turn, will be more concordant in non-identical twins than in non-siblings. Early work, for example, showed that the statistical correlation of skin-mole counts between identical twins was 0.4, while non-identical twins had a correlation of only 0.2. (A score of 1.0 implies perfect correlation, while a score of zero implies no correlation.) This result suggests that moles are heritable, but it also implies that there is an environmental component to the development of moles, otherwise the correlation in identical twins would be close to 1.0.
Twin research has shown that whether or not someone takes up smoking is determined mainly by environmental factors, but once he does so, how much he smokes is largely down to his genes. And while a person's religion is clearly a cultural attribute, there is a strong genetic component to religious fundamentalism. Twin studies are also unravelling the heritability of various aspects of human personality. Traits from neuroticism and anxiety to thrill- and novelty-seeking all have large genetic components. Parenting matters, but it does not determine personality in the way that some had thought.
More importantly, perhaps, twin studies are helping the understanding of diseases such as cancer, asthma（气喘病）, osteoporosis（骨质疏松）, arthritis（关节炎）and immune disorders. And twins can be used, within ethical limits, for medical experiments. A study that administered vitamin C to one twin and a placebo（安慰剂；宽心话）to the other found that it had no effect on the common cold.
The lesson from all today's twin studies is that most human traits are at least partially influenced by genes. However, for the most part, the age-old dichotomy between nature and nurture is not very useful. Many genetic programs are open to input from the environment, and genes are frequently switched on or off by environmental signals. It is also possible that genes themselves influence their environment. Some humans have an innate preference for participation in sports. Others are drawn to novelty. Might people also be drawn to certain kinds of friends and types of experience? In this way, a person's genes might shape the environment they act in as much as the environment shapes the actions of the genes.
35、Shooting for the moon
Sep 22nd 2005 From The Economist print edition
NASA plans a new architecture to support human spaceflight
THERE is something suspiciously precise about a cost estimate of $104 billion for any project. And scepticism is appropriate when this sum is the result of four months' work by NASA, America's space agency, on a project dubbed the 60-day study.
Nevertheless, NASA's new plans for a return to the moon manage to please a surprisingly large constituency. By 2018, NASA wants to be able to land on the moon for seven-day visits and prepare for longer stays. By 2010, it also needs to have a successor to the shuttle, or one almost ready to fly. Plus, it would rather like the private sector to offer a cheaper way of delivering cargo to the International Space Station than the deal it gets from its current overfed contractors. Oh, and it would really rather like to go to Mars, someday, if at all possible.
The key to all of this is to have not one new vehicle but two. The first is an Apollo-like ship called the Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV) that can transport up to six crew to and from the space station, and which could conceivably be docked to the station as an emergency life raft. But this craft could also dock in orbit with a separately launched crew exploration vehicle (CEV) that contains propulsion to go to the moon and a lunar lander. NASA says it can do all of this on its annual budget.
Launching the craft using shuttle-derived components will save money. The CEV would have to be launched by a heavy-lift vehicle but this could also take cargo to the space station, or bits into orbit for a Mars shot. And launching the crew will be safer than using the shuttle because astronauts will sit above the rocket, avoiding falling foam.
With all the shuttle-derived components, NASA can keep most of its facilities open (and the politicians happy). Finally, the NASA administrator, Mike Griffin, has even thrown a small bone to the private sector. He says the structure “allows” the cargo ship to “stand down” from supplying the station. The only rabbit Dr Griffin has not pulled out of the hat is to explain how he can afford to build the CLV while keeping the shuttle going. He probably didn't want to spoil the fun this week by explaining that he will have to cancel many of the remaining shuttle missions. And how will America send astronauts to the space station before the shuttle's replacement is available? It is surely no coincidence that NASA is now going to be allowed to buy more Russian-made Soyuz—even though the terms of the Iran Non-Proliferation Act presently forbid the agency from doing so.
36、Stem cells and business
Hype over experience
Sep 22nd 2005 From The Economist print edition
The commercial potential of stem cells
Get article background
MEDICAL discoveries often excite great hopes—and stem cells are no exception. They can transform themselves into other types of tissue, such as skin or nerve cells. This opens the possibility that they might be used to repair damage done by disease. As a result, stem cells have been credited with almost miraculous healing potential, offering the possibility of treating disorders from diabetes to damaged spinal cords.
With such great medical promise come grand financial predictions. Some analysts have forecast a $10 billion market for stem-cell technologies by 2010. But not Michael Steiner and Nils Behnke, consultants with Bain & Company. They have taken a close look at the state of the science, regulation and commercial environment surrounding stem cells and come up with a far more modest (and convincing) forecast of $100m for stem-cell therapies by the end of this decade, possibly rising to $2 billion by 2015.
According to Bain's estimates, there are now roughly 140 stem-cell-related products in development, for various forms of cancer, liver disease and other conditions. But more than four-fifths of these projects are in early-stage development, where many a gleam in a scientist's eye dies, and still far from the clinical studies where promising new treatments can also still falter. In addition to these scientific hurdles, the field is fraught with ethical debate over some of its most promising areas, such as the use of stem cells from embryos and therapeutic cloning.
This controversy has translated into restrictive regulations in many parts of Europe. While some American states, notably California, have pressed ahead with stem-cell research, the federal government maintains a tight policy on embryonic stem cells—which have more therapeutic potential, but which are also more controversial because they are often associated with abortion or cloning. Since it is the federal government which has the biggest pot of research money, many scientists are frustrated by the pace of development.
All eyes are now on the United States Congress, which is due to consider changes to current stem-cell legislation, possibly lifting some of its restrictions later this year. Meanwhile new centres of biomedical research, such as South Korea and Singapore, are pressing ahead with stem cells, leaving many others behind.
All these risks are putting a damper on funding. Mr Steiner reckons that just over $1 billion was spent on stem-cell work last year, a mere 1% of global spending on health-care R&D. More than four-fifths of that investment came from governments. Venture capital, the traditional engine of biotechnology, is remarkably scarce in stem cells. Only $50m was pumped into the field last year, as private investors look for safer bets in more developed products with larger markets, where regulation and patent protection is more clearly defined. It will be some time yet before the reality of stem cells catches up with the rhetoric.
37、Sleep research
Stuff that dreams are made on
Sep 9th 2004 From The Economist print edition
There seems to be a dream-specific region in the brain
AS SCIENTIFIC research goes, the study of dreaming may seem questionable. Tomes of psychobabble have been written on the meaning of dreams, beginning with the works of Freud and Jung, the founders of psychoanalysis. But whether you find yourself flying over a city or giving a speech naked, studies of the images themselves do not seem to answer the “how” and “why” questions of human dreaming.
The question of “where”, though, now seems to have an answer. Dreams are either generated in, or transmitted through, a part of the brain called the right inferior lingual gyrus. At least, that seems to be the inference of a piece of research just published in the Annals of Neurology by Matthias Bischof and Claudio Bassetti, of the University Hospital of Bern.
Their paper concerns a 73-year-old woman who dreamed prolifically until she suffered a stroke. After that, her dreams stopped. There are precedents for this, but in previous reported cases the loss of dreaming was accompanied by other effects, such as loss of the ability to recognise faces and places. In this case, the patient reported no other symptoms.
First, Dr Bischof and Dr Bassetti examined their patient using a brain-scanning technique called magnetic-resonance imaging. This showed the extent of the damage caused by the stroke, and revealed that the right inferior lingual gyrus, which is in the visual cortex, was the worst affected part. They then examined their patient's sleep patterns.
Orthodox theory says that dreaming is linked to a phenomenon called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. That orthodoxy has been challenged of late, by studies that show people dreaming during other phases of sleep, as well. The work carried out by Dr Bischof and Dr Bassetti challenges the orthodoxy from the other direction, for they found that apart from her lack of dreams, their patient had a normal pattern of REM sleep. It also challenges the idea that dreaming is somehow necessary for mental well-being—in particular, the theory that it is involved in the process of memory formation.
That was already under scrutiny, too, because some dream researchers believe that 1-2% of healthy people sleep without dreaming. Locating the seat of dreaming would make studying these healthy non-dreamers—if that is what they are—much easier to do.
The two researchers are not suggesting that the right inferior lingual gyrus is necessarily the fons et origo of dreaming, but they are suggesting that it is a critical—and specific—component of the process. Or, as the careful language of the paper puts it, that a lesion in this part of the brain is the “minimal sufficient damage” that can cause loss of dreams.
Eventually, the patient regained some of her ability to dream, but even after a year she still reported that her dreams were rare, and lacked intensity. Oddly, though, on the third night after her stroke she had one last, vivid dream. It involved colourfully dressed little men on a large piece of cotton and a lot of anxiety. Chew on that one, Dr Freud.
38、Radiation
Testing times
Sep 9th 2004 From The Economist print edition
There is now evidence that radiation damage can be passed down the generations
DURING the 1950s, one of the least inviting holiday destinations on the planet would have been Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan. It is a mere 150km (about 100 miles) from the Soviet Union's main atomic-bomb testing site and it was subjected to the fallout from 118 tests over 13 years. From this and other grim and inadvertent experiments, it is clear that nuclear radiation is a powerful cause of mutations in human DNA in the ordinary cells (those that are not concerned with reproduction) of the body. Such mutations can, in turn, cause cancers. But evidence supporting another oft-voiced fear—that radiation-induced mutations might affect human reproductive (or “germ-line”) cells—is weak and surprisingly controversial.
That is now changing. On September 7th, Yuri Dubrova, a geneticist at the University of Leicester, in England, presented a study of radiation-induced mutation in human germ cells (sperm and eggs) to a scientific meeting called “Children with Leukaemia”, which was held in London. He and his colleagues have been looking for mutations in the germ cells of those who live in areas contaminated by fallout from the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986.
They have done this by examining parts of the human genome that contain repetitive sequences of DNA, and comparing corresponding regions in exposed and unexposed people from rural areas of Ukraine and Belarus. These repetitive sequences are easy to quantify, and mutation rates in different places can thus be calculated. The upshot is that men (though not women) exposed to fallout had a 1.6-fold increase in the mutation rate of DNA in their germ cells.
Dr Dubrova has also worked with the unfortunate denizens of Semey, as Semipalatinsk was renamed after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Overground atomic testing was halted in 1965, so he was able to find families in Semey with varying levels of exposure to radiation. He can now show that as the radiation dose decreased, so did the mutation-rate in the germ cells. This kind of “dose-response curve” is the sort of thing that turns toxicologists weak at the knees, because it shows a quantitative relationship between the putative cause and the effect.
Until Dr Dubrova's work, studies on human germ-line radiation-damage had drawn a blank. The children of people who lived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they were bombed, those of Chernobyl clean-up workers, and those born to cancer patients who had been treated with radiotherapy had all failed to show a higher incidence of inherited mutation. And work that did show an increase in such malformations (in children in the Chernobyl region) was inconclusive because there was a similar increase in malformations in uncontaminated areas.
Of course, the crucial question is not whether germ cells are susceptible to mutation, but whether such mutations are passed from parent to offspring, and whether they can then cause disease. Dr Dubrova has shown such transgenerational instability in mice, and has demonstrated that it can be transmitted at least as far as the third generation.
In normal circumstances, the mice who inherit this genetic instability have no greater risk of developing cancer than normal mice. However, if they are “challenged” with a carcinogenic substance they have a much higher incidence of cancer. There is, says Dr Dubrova, not a shred of evidence that the same is true in humans. Nevertheless, he will go so far as to speculate that transgenerational instability might be a contributing factor to the unexplained cluster of childhood leukaemia cases around the Sellafield nuclear plant in England, which was the site of an accident in 1957.
39、Wind power Ill winds
Jul 29th 2004 From The Economist print edition
Wind farms disfigure the countryside and threaten to cost £1 billion a year. Apart from that, they're great
FROM sacred cow to white elephant is a short jump. Wind power, once seen as the eco-friendly cure-all for Britain's energy problems, is attracting unprecedented criticism. The latest campaign, which unites veteran greens and the opposition Tories, opposes a proposed installation of 27 wind turbines next to Romney Marsh in Kent, a noted bird sanctuary and beauty spot. Hundreds more are planned elsewhere—many in beautiful bits of the countryside where some of Britain's richest people happen to live. A bunch of media-savvy local organisations is now lobbying hard to stop them.
The government remains unmoved. It calls wind power “the most proven green source of electricity generation” and cites Denmark as a role model. Renewables (mostly wind) account for 20% of electrical generation capacity there. Renewable energy is needed both to cut CO2 emissions, promised under the Kyoto treaty(京都议定书), and to reach the government's own target of generating 10% of British electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The cost of this to the taxpayer is likely to be £1 billion a year by 2020.
But as well as Tories, toffs and country-lovers, many others think that wind power is seriously flawed. The first big problem is that it is too expensive. Although the British Wind Energy Association puts the cost of electricity from onshore wind farms at 2.5p per kilowatt-hour, only slightly more costly than other power sources, the Royal Academy of Engineering claims that on a more realistic view of construction costs it is much dearer（more expensive）: 3.7p when generated onshore and 5.5p offshore.
The government has tried to bridge this gap with tradable certificates. The wind-gatherers gain one of these for each megawatt-hour they generate. Power distribution companies then buy them as an alternative to paying the fines levied for failing to buy a set proportion (currently 4.9%) of renewable energy annually. But a recent House of Lords report noted a big snag: the nearer the industry gets to meeting the government's targets, the less the value of the certificates; once the target is passed, their worth falls abruptly to zero.
So the certificates, which will cost consumers a cool £500m this year and will be even more expensive next year, cap the supply of renewable energy instead of encouraging it. In effect, firms will buy only the minimum amount of renewable energy necessary to comply with the law.
Then there are the engineering problems. Too light a breeze means no power; too strong a gale and the turbines shut down to prevent damage. Even the wind-lovers expect that the farms will manage only 30% of their full capacity on average. Worse, that output can fluctuate rapidly—by up to 20% of the total national wind capacity in the space of a single hour, according to Hugh Sharman, an energy consultant, who has studied Denmark's wind industry. Furthermore, in a typical year like 2002, he says, there were 54 days when the air was so still that virtually no wind power was generated at all.
But whereas Denmark can import power from Norway and Germany to keep the lights on during calm periods, Britain's power grid is not set up for imports. So conventional coal-, oil- or gas-fired power stations would have to be kept running, ready to take up the load. That sharply raises the real cost of wind energy and means extra CO2 emissions.
Ministers may be right when they argue that wind power is the only renewable energy source that has even a theoretical chance of meeting the government's targets. Given the costs and technical uncertainties, perhaps it would be better to abandon those targets altogether.
40、Offshoring
More gain than pain
Jul 15th 2004 From The Economist print edition
Why America wins, but Germany loses
NO WORD scares the world's hand-wringing professional classes so much as “offshoring”. Even journalists fear being replaced by some keen—and above all, cheap—young thing in Bangalore（班加罗尔，印度中南部工业城市）. No wonder a debate rages about the merits, or otherwise, of moving jobs offshore. Is offshoring a “hollowing out”(挖空) of rich-country jobs? Or does it provide benefits to rich and poor countries alike, while harming few workers? Actually, both claims may be right. Just compare Germany and America.
According to a new study from the McKinsey Global Institute, every dollar of corporate spending shifted offshore by an American firm—mostly, now, to India—generates $1.13 in new wealth for America's economy. However, when a German firm moves a euro to a cheaper place to buy services, its home economy is on average 20 cents worse off.
German firms send roughly 60% of their “offshore” work to eastern Europe, and only 40% to India. American firms steer much more of their offshore work to the subcontinent, which is cheaper. While firms in both Germany and America are able to通过（离岸）外包节约大量的成本, the Americans save 20% more. Moreover, says the study, America's economy is more likely to benefit from all those Indian body-shops buying American products, ranging from Dell computers to the Coca-Cola that fuels programmers' late nights. German products are less enticing. And American shareholders are more likely than German investors to have a stake in an Indian offshoring company, further increasing America's gains. Yet all of this still only explains a small part of America's offshoring advantage.
The biggest difference emerges when workers who have been fired in the offshoring process look for new work. In America, McKinsey estimates that around 70% of workers ousted in favour of offshore alternatives find new work within six months.。 In Germany, however, the re-employment rate is only around 40%. The reason? Above all, Germany's thicket of labour laws, which discourages firms from hiring workers who may prove a hard-to-shed liability. Admittedly, these same laws—which are increasingly under fire —also make it harder for German fims to shed workers to take advantage of efficiency-enhancing offshoring. The lesson: offshoring may be an easy target for politicians, but if they have flexible labour markets it may actually be a good thing, not just for big firms, but for everyone.
关键词： offshoring（outsourcing）离岸外包，labor law劳动法
单词和短语：offshoring ，hand-wringing, hard-to-shed liability，thicket
背景和文化：
1:McKinsey Global Institute：麦肯锡全球研究所，位于华盛顿的智囊团。是一家咨询公司，提供涉及26个行业和职能的咨询服务。
2:offshoring（outsourcing）离岸外包：
A：什么是离岸外包（经济学家给出的定义）：the transfer of the provision of services previously carried out by in-house personnel, to an external organisation usually under a contract with agreed standards, costs, and conditions. Areas traditionally outsourced include legal services, transport, catering, and security. An increasing range of activities, including IT services, training, and public relations are now being outsourced. Outsourcing, or contracting out, often is introduced with the aim of increasing efficiency and reducing costs, or to enable the organisation to develop greater flexibility or to concentrate on core business activities. The term subcontracting is sometimes used to refer to outsourcing.
B：离岸外包对国家经济的影响：外包本来是传统制造企业为了降低成本、提高效益而采用的将产品的非关键部分通过分包合同让别的公司或海外公司来做的一种经营方式，但在21世纪初，由于大批美国高科技企业的参与以及外包的方向由发达国家转向发展中国家，外包不仅成了经济全球化条件下国际分工的一种新形式，而且由于外包导致外包方工作机会的外流或减少而成为外包方国家的所必须面对的一个政治问题。美国是当今世界外包最盛行的国家之一，其外包的目的国多为东南亚国家，包括印度，马来西亚，中国等。
C: 一个外包的例子：每一家公司在经营过程中，都要力争减少或控制成本，以获取最大的效益。外包就具有这种功能。比如一家轴承加工厂，其核心业务是制造轴承，但这家企业并不能集中所有的力量于这项业务，它还必须处理诸如办公室文案、人事资源管理、库存管理以及财务会计等工作，这些工作花费了很多资源。如果采用外包方式，将一些非核心业务交给该项服务的提供者，就可以集中自己的资源和优势生产轴承。可见，外包实际上是一种节约成本、发挥比较优势的经营方式。
D: 离岸外包的政治化趋向:离岸外包成为一个政治问题与的经济职能有关。一国的经济目标一般有四个：经济增长、物价稳定、国际收支平衡及充分就业。其中，就业问题直接与社会稳定相关，因此，充分就业不仅是经济问题，而且还是社会问题和政治问题。拿美国打比方，现在，美国本土90％企业的60％的软件开发外包到了印度。这就必然会对美国本土的IT从业人员的就业带来冲击。如果有个行业失业问题严重，就会影响到这个社会，所以说外包问题既是一个经济问题，又是一个政治问题。
E: 离岸外包的优势：离岸外包的经营方式遵循的是比较优势原理。在当今世界，没有哪一家企业能在每一项业务上都拥有与别人一样的优势和效率。因此，企业要作出选择。首先，要将自己所生产的产品与所消耗的资源相比较，找出不利于企业利润增长的活动；然后，将其外包给可以用更少的资源提供这种活动或服务的企业。可以在核心业务领域中重新分配资源，增强企业的核心竞争力；可以最大限度地节约资源和时间成本；可以用更少的成本聘用更为专业的专家。
41、China Grudge match
Aug 12th 2004 | BEIJING From The Economist print edition
The ugly face of Chinese nationalism
IT IS not unusual for soccer fans around the world to indulge in crude violence. While England is widely reckoned to lead the league tables in soccer hooliganism, fans in plenty of other countries have likewise disgraced themselves with boorish behaviour. China is no exception. Mob ugliness simmered for hours in Beijing during and following the Asian Cup final against Japan on August 7th, which ended in a 3-1 defeat for the home side. And yet there was something uniquely ominous in the air, as visceral and ferocious anti-Japanese sentiment boiled over.
After booing and heckling the Japanese team (and the Japanese national anthem) in the stadium, thousands of Chinese fans massed outside, many chanting vile and violent anti-Japanese curses, clashing with police, fighting, and throwing rubbish. The hardest of hard-core ruffians threatened anyone who looked Japanese and forced a busload of Japanese fans to retreat behind lines of body-armoured riot police. Later they moved their ugly show to the street outside the hotel of the Japanese team, which left Beijing the following day—ahead of schedule and under heavy police escort.
As the presence of so many riot police indicated, none of this was unexpected, and indeed many feared worse. Nationalism runs high in China, and anti-Japanese sentiment runs even higher. This stems from Japan's brutal wartime occupation of China, and from what the vast majority of Chinese consider Japan's utter failure to face up to its guilty history. More recent irritants include a bilateral territorial dispute over a group of islands and revelations that visiting Japanese businessmen in China have indulged in rampant orgies with local prostitutes.
Chinese leaders and state-run media have long made a practice of reinforcing a harsh line on Japan, scolding Japan for its past crimes and for its current attitudes, which validates negative sentiment among the people. With precious few permissible avenues for political expression in China, a high-stakes sporting event makes for a grand political stage.
Given all this (and the fact that all three Japanese goals involved dubious referee calls), Chinese authorities could breathe a sigh of relief that the violence was not worse. But as Beijing prepares to receive the Olympic flag upon the conclusion of the games in Athens, authorities now have to refute the suggestion raised by many—including the general secretary of the Asian Football Confederation, Peter Velappan—that China's nationalistic passions could interfere with its ability to host the 2008 Olympics.
42、EUROPE
The Olympics For a wreath, a flag—or cash?
Aug 12th 2004 From The Economist print edition
A global market in brawn could challenge Olympic chauvinism
IF DEMOSTHENES, the ancient Greek orator, could observe the Athens Olympics, he might devote one of his tirades to the ever-changing relationship between nations, individuals and sports.
In his time, of course, only Greeks could take part in the games. Rivalry between the warring Hellenic states was set aside to allow for noble competition between individual sportsmen—whose only reward was an olive wreath.
But in 16, when the games were revived—in Greece again—modern nationalism was on the rise in Europe. People thought history was made, and states were built, by well-defined, hermetically sealed “nations” with a supreme claim on their subjects' loyalty. No wonder, then, that the modern games became a contest not among athletes but between countries. Over the course of the 20th century, as the whole world caught nation-state fever, having a fine Olympic team became as important a symbol for newly formed countries as a flag, an anthem, an airline and a big embassy in a leafy district of Washington, DC.
But how will it be in the 21st century, when capital and labour flow seamlessly across national boundaries, and more and more people change their citizenship several times over a lifetime?
Already, some athletes switch countries because competition for Olympic places at home is too fierce, or to get better training—or just because money talks. And nationalism itself is fuelling a market in brawn, as rich states buy talent from poor ones. Qatar and Bahrain have poached eight athletes in all from Kenya. Stephen Cherono, a Kenyan runner, is, for example, said to have been promised $1,000 a month for life to become a Qatari named Saif Saeed Shaheen.
Rich countries are not the only buyers. A Cuban-born triple jumper, Yamile Aldama, was prevented from competing for Britain because she could not get British citizenship in time, though she lives in London. So Ms Aldama went to Khartoum to become Sudanese in two days.
The masters of the games hate this. “We should avoid this transfer market in athletes,” the International Olympic Committee (IOC) president, Jacques Rogge, has said. “We don't like athletes being lured by large incentives by other countries and giving them a passport when they arrive at the airport.”
But in a world where multinational corporations sponsor the games, why shouldn't there be multinational athletes? Probably because cheering one's flag is still one of the event's main selling points, and a free market in athletes would endanger the national pride that still underlies the event's commercial success. “The money depends on the audience, and the audience depends on symbolisms, which often include nationalism,” says Laurence Chalip, co-author of a textbook, “Sport Governance in the Global Community”.
Kevin Wamsley, director of the Centre for Olympic Studies, says the IOC may be on a “slippery slope” as borders erode. “It might be better for sport if people stopped cheering for nations and cheered for individuals, but that's not what the Olympics have been built on.”
43、Those Olympic Games
A matter of priorities
Sep 2nd 2004 From The Economist print edition
Great sport, great television, pity about the misspent billions
WELL, for a fortnight it was a splendid party. Now for the Olympic bills—and that hangover will last for years. The Greek Olympic committee reckons it can break even: half of its $2.3 billion budget for running the games will come, via the International Olympic Committee, from broadcasters, most of the rest from commercial sponsors, ticket sales and merchandising. But what about the taxpayer? Overall, Greek and (modestly) other European Union taxpayers have spent $300m helping to run the games, nearly $1.5 billion keeping them secure, and some $7 billion preparing facilities for them. In all, that means near 5% of 2003 Greek GDP, roughly $800 for every single inhabitant, pensioner or babe, taxpayer or not. Top-level sport is a business, albeit not, in the Olympic version, one aiming for profit—nor answerable to outside shareholders. Should it be subsidised to this extent?
Most Greeks think so. They were told the games would be costly. Few can have doubted the costs would go wildly over budget; in the event, by about 50%. That figure of $800 per head was not put flatly to them, but if the opinion polls are any guide, four Greeks in five welcomed the games—and probably still do: their country rebutted the sneers that nothing would be ready, it ran the show well, it has had a terrific time and weeks of exposure to the world's cameras, and it is left with some durable improvements to its infrastructure. Anyway, these Greeks can say, an elected government, backed by public opinion, is entitled to do what it likes: others send men into space, we run the Olympics—as we should have been allowed to do in 1996, centenary of their first modern celebration.
That is true. But democratic governments can do damn-fool things; sending men into space, for example. Was the Greeks' spending wise? Prestige, publicity and proud memories are not to be ignored. But what else is left? A magnificent stadium and its accompanying public park in Athens, plus various other venues in the city or nearby; four big provincial stadiums; some cheap housing in the capital; better roads there, a bigger and better metro system, a new suburban rail line and a new tramway to the southern beaches. As one Athenian version puts it, 20 years' infrastructure improvements in five.
Actually, that is not what they got. Less than $1.5 billion of the money spent has gone into the EU-subsidised transport improvements, sensible as they may be. Two weeks of security apart, most of the rest has gone into the new sports facilities. Some of these will be useful in the future, some less so. It is a fair bet that all will lose money, unless Greece can somehow achieve what rich and sports-mad Australia, with its inheritance from the Sydney games of 2000, has not. That seems unlikely. Granted, sports facilities can be a public good, and one that most voters approve of. But are world-class sports facilities really the public good on which the hugely indebted government of a small and not very rich country such as Greece should rush to spend over $5.5 billion? What about schools and hospitals, or the roads and other bits of infrastructure that might generate business investment, and so produce genuine economic growth, rather than mere prestige?
In this context, the Greek government's claim that “oh, we'll cut spending in other ways” is hardly persuasive or even to the point. If public spending ought to be or can readily be cut, cut it anyway. If you need better public infrastructure, invest in what you need, not in what suits the International Olympic Committee.
44、China
The road to Beijing
Sep 2nd 2004 From The Economist print edition
A phrasebook for the 2008 Olympics
“LET'S drink to the success of the Olympic Games! Cheers!” This, it seems, is what the Chinese government wants to hear from foreigners, and in flawless Chinese, too. To that end, it has drawn up a handy new phrasebook “Basic Chinese 100 for Beijing 2008 Olympic Games”, which will allow novice Chinese speakers to render such phrases, not to mention praises.
The phrasebook is China's latest propaganda tool: colorful, slick and heavily subsidized. The book, edited by the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad and the National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, will be distributed globally to promote a conveniently stripped-down version of the Chinese language for visitors to the games.
Judging by the tone of the book, China is expecting to blow the world away with its Olympic extravaganza. After careful study of its pages, sentences like “the sports facilities are very good, everything is exceptionally well organized and the service is great” should simply roll off the tongue.
Phrasebook users will get up to speed on the lingo through the adventures of an American tourist called Mike. From simple greetings to room service, public transport to poetical observations (“The sky is bluer, the water is clearer and Beijing is becoming more and more beautiful”), millions of Mikes will be equipped to say just the right things. As with Orwell's Newspeak, dissent is impossible, since there are no words in which it could conceivably be expressed.
Beijing's city authorities have already started teaching English to taxi drivers, policemen, and ordinary citizens to ensure the communication effort goes both ways. With Athens now over, the world is turning its attention to Beijing, and there is no time to waste.
The next Olympics will crown 30 years of economic reform in China, and the government hopes they will be recognition of its pretentions to be a great power. By 2008, China aims to have spent $37 billion on the games, dwarfing the $8.7 billion spent by Greece. Small wonder that the organizers assume that Beijing 2008 will be a success, well worthy of a florid toast.
45、Mating songs
Melodic mice
Nov 3rd 2005 From The Economist print edition
Male mice sing when they scent the female of the species
PRESENTED with the possibility of sex, creatures can behave in odd ways. One strategy is to burst into song. Birds and amphibians have long been known to croon in the presence of a potential mate, but among mammals only humans, whales and bats were thought to serenade a possible partner. Now the humble mouse has joined the list.
Timothy Holy and Zhongsheng Guo of the Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, made the discovery after studying how male mice respond to female mouse pheromones, the chemical signals linked, among other things, to mating. The mice made noises inaudible to the human ear, and the researchers recorded and analysed them.
By dropping the pitch of the recordings so that humans could hear it, the researchers found that it sounded remarkably like birdsong. Each mouse made a series of “chirps” with bursts of closely spaced notes interspersed with lulls. Details were published this week in the Public Library of Science Biology.
To be classified as a song, a vocalisation has to contain distinct notes, rather than one sound repeated, as well as motifs and themes that recur from time to time. The researchers identified distinct clusters of pitch changes in the songs by analysing a set of 750 syllables produced by one mouse in a single 210-second recording. They concluded that these pitch changes followed a pattern and were thus a song. Tests with 45 different mice produced similar results, although each mouse had its distinct chanson.
Exactly why mice sing is not yet known, but given that the males are stimulated to sing when they smell female pheromones, it seems likely that it is to do with sex. If so, the song should contain information about their quality as a potential mate. The researchers will now investigate this possibility. They also plan to examine whether wild mice sing different songs to laboratory mice.
Moreover, as the mouse genome has been mapped it may be possible to discover fundamental principles about the genetic contributions to singing and the learning of songs. This could uncover basic truths about the brain and, researchers say, may eventually help scientists better understand disorders of communication, such as autism.
Copyright © 2019-2025 51dongshi.net 版权所有
违法及侵权请联系：TEL:177 7030 7066 E-MAIL:11247931@qq.com 本站由北京市万商天勤律师事务所王兴未律师提供法律服务
