Do the following statements agree with the information given in the article?
| TRUE | FALSE | NOTGIVEN |
1. In the USA the GDP statistics is released quarterly.
2. The term RECESSION is a synonym for ECONOMIC CRISIS
3. The first US GDP statistical records date back to the beginning of the 20th century.
4. In the 1930s, in response to the information gap revealed by the Great Depression, Wassily Leontief,a Russian-born American economist, developed a set of national income accounts.
5. According to Dirk Philipsen, the author of “The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule The World and What to Do about It”, one of the biggest flaws is that GDP aims to measure market economy while housework doesn’t count in the figure.
6. The author of the article believes that excessive focus on GDP figures is the main cause of reckless consumerism in modern society.
7. The author claims, that environmental protection hinders economic progress.
8. In his opinion, shift to greener economies accounts for higher unemployment in energy industries.
9. The author agrees that, higher GDP leads to economic prosperity.
10. GDP growth rate,according to the author, has been the single most important target for policymakers in the post-War period.
11. MrPhilipsen suggests a less subjective alternative measure of sustainable development.
Exercise № 5
Suggest the Russian for the following word combinations.
resourceful economist; monetary transactions; to affect GDP; to boost output; to allow for the quality of education; drug dealing; “black economy” transactions; to enhance processing power of computers; depletion of natural resources; oil consumption per capita; to shift to greener economies; to tackle an issue; to acknowledge the hazards; distribution of wealth; improved infant mortality;to keep unemployment down;subjective judgments; to seek sustainability; raising taxes on the rich; increasing benefits for the poor; obsessive focus on GDP.
Exercise № 6.
Give English equivalents to the following word combinations.
финансовые рынки; резкое снижение ВВП; оценить масштаб экономической активности; Великая Депрессия; разработать модель; денежно-кредитная политика; защитник окружающей среды; существенный недостаток; пересчитать ВВП; общество бездумного потребления;убедительные доводы; экономический рост; ухудшение состояния окружающей среды; препятствовать повышению спроса; повышение цен; рост безработицы в отраслях энергетического сектора; оценить уровень благосостояния; увеличение продолжительности жизни; сдерживать повышение темпов инфляции; определение ориентиров на будущее; плановый показатель номинального ВВП; экономическая эффективность; отказаться от использования показателя.
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READING AND SPEAKING II
Read the article and do the assignments that follow.
Measuring what matters
Man does not live by GDP alone.
How well off are Americans? Frenchmen? Indians? Ghanaians? An economist’s simplest answer is the gross domestic product, or GDP, per person of each country. To help you compare the figures, he will convert them into dollars, either at market exchange rates or (better) at purchasing-power-parity rates, which allow for the cheapness of, say, haircuts and taxi rides in poorer parts of the world.
To be sure, this will give you a fair guide to material standards of living: the Americans and the French, on average, are much richer than Indians and Ghanaians. But you may suspect, and the economist should know, that this is not the whole truth. America’s GDP per head is higher than France’s, but the French spend less time at work, so are they really worse off? An Indian may be desperately poor and yet say he is happy; an American may be well fed yet fed up. GDP was designed to measure only the value of goods and services produced in a country, and it does not even do that precisely. How well off people feel also depends on things GDP does not capture, such as their health or whether they have a job.
In recent years economists have therefore been looking at other measures of well-being-even “happiness”, a notion that it once seemed absurd to quantify. Among those convinced that official statisticians should join in is Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president. On September 14th 2009 a commission he appointed, comprising 25 prominent social scientists, five with Nobel prizes in economics, presented its findings.
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The commission divided its work into three parts. The first deals with familiar criticisms of GDP as a measure of well-being. It takes no account of the depreciation of capital goods, and so overstates the value of production. Moreover, the value of production is based on market prices, but not everything has a price. The list of such things includes more than the environment. The worth of services not supplied through markets, such as state health care or education, owner-occupied housing or unpaid childcare by parents, is “imputed” or left out, even though private health care and schooling, renting and child-minding are directly measured.
The report also argues that official statisticians should concentrate on households’ incomes, consumption and wealth rather than total production. All these adjustments make a difference. In 2005, the commission found, France’s real GDP per person was 73% of America’s. But once government services, household production and leisure are added in, the gap narrows: French households had 87% of the adjusted income of their American counterparts.
Next the commission turns to measures of the “quality of life”. These attempt to capture well-being beyond a mere command of economic resources. One approach quantifies people’s subjective well-being. For many years researchers had been spurred on by an apparent paradox: that rising incomes did not make people happier in the long run. Exactly what, beyond income, affects subjective well-being-from health, marital status and age to perceptions of corruption-is much pored over. The unemployed report lower scores, even allowing for their lower incomes. Joblessness hits more than your wallet.
Third, the report examines the well-being of future generations. People alive today will pass on a stock of exhaustible and other natural resources as well as machines, buildings and social institutions. Their children’s human capital (skills and so forth) will depend on investment in education and research today. Economic activity is sustainable if future generations can expect to be at least as well off as today’s. Finding a single measure that captures all this, the report concludes, seems too ambitious. That sounds right. For one thing, statisticians would have to make assumptions about the relative value of, say, the environment and new buildings-not just today, but many years from now. It is probably wiser to look at a wide range of figures.
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Some members of the commission believe that the financial crisis and the recession have made a broadening of official statistics more urgent. It is perhaps going too far to hope that had there been a better measurement system, one that would have signalled problems ahead, so governments might have taken early measures to avoid or at least to mitigate the present turmoil. Stockmarket indices, soaring house prices and low inflation surely did more to feed bankers' and borrowers' exaggerated sense of well-being. But there might have been less euphoria had financial markets and policymakers been less fixated on GDP.
Broadening official statistics is a good idea in its own right. Some countries have already started-notably, tiny Bhutan. There are pitfalls, though. The report justifies wider measures of well-being partly by noting that the public must have trust in official statistics. Quite so; which makes it all the more important that the statisticians are independent of government. Another risk is that a proliferation of measures could be a gift to interest groups, letting them pick numbers that amplify their misery in order to demand a bigger share of the national pie. But these are early days. Meanwhile, get measuring.
The Economist, September 17th, 2009
NOTES
1. Purchasingpowerparity (PPP) -паритет покупательной способности, ППС (равенство стоимости корзин идентичных товаров в разных странах, пересчитанных в одну валюту по существующему валютному курсу, и, следовательно, равенство покупательной способности их национальных валют). Курс по паритету покупательной способности является идеальным курсом обмена валют, рассчитанным как средневзвешенное соотношение цен для стандартной корзины промышленных, потребительских товаров и услуг двух стран.
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2. qualityoflife- качество жизни - обобщающая социально-экономическая категория, представляющая обобщение понятия "уровень жизни", включает в себя не только уровень потребления материальных благ и услуг, но и удовлетворение духовных потребностей, здоровье, продолжительность жизни, условия среды, окружающей человека, морально-психологический климат, душевный комфорт.
USEFUL TERMS AND EXPRESSIONS
· capture –охватывать, отражать
· standard of living/living standard –уровеньжизни
· tobewelloff –быть обеспеченным, состоятельным
· tobebetteroff / worseoff –бытьбогаче/беднее; быть в лучшем/худшем положении
· well-being –благосостояние
· wealth –богатство, благосостояние, материальные блага
· to take account of-учитывать
· toquantify –производить количественную оценку
· capitalgoods –товары производственного назначения, средства производства
· depreciation –амортизация, износ, снижение стоимости
· government services-государственныеуслуги
· a gap –расхождение, разрыв, несоответствие
· joblessness–безработица
syn. unemployment
· theunemployed –безработные (субстантивированное прилагательное)
· sustainable –1) стабильный, сбалансированный 2) допустимый, приемлемый
· to make an assumption– допустить, предположить
· exhaustibleresources– исчерпаемые природные ресурсы
· to mitigate– уменьшить, ослабить, умерить
· turmoil– неразбериха, хаос, кризис
Exercise № 7
Choose the correct answer.
1. The GDP per capita is designed to measure
· the quality of life
· the value of goods and services produced by the population of this country
· the total output of a country divided by the total number of people
· the amount of money that is being earned per person in a country
2. The author considers GDP per head to be an inaccurate measure of quality of life in a country because
· it takes no account of depreciation of capital goods
· it only captures material wealth but excludes some phenomena which have anincreasing impact on the well-being of citizens
· it is based on market prices
· it is normally revised after a certain period of time
3. It can be inferred that had there been more awareness of the limitations of standard metrics, like GDP,
· the financial crises and recession could have been avoided
· bankers and borrowers would have felt worse-off
· there would have been less euphoria over economic performance in the years prior to the crisis
· the policymakers would have taken early measure to moderate the melt-down
4. The key message of the report is that the time is ripe
· to dismiss GDP and production measures
· to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being in the context of sustainability
· to focus on material living standards that are more closely associated with measures of real household income and consumption
· to ensure that statisticians are independent of governments
Exercise №8
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