Vocabulary Notes

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 373.

PRODUCTIVITY

Unit 14

IV. Write about two cities you know. Compare them.

III. Translate.

1. Отели в Неаполе дешевле, чем в Лиссабоне.
2. В Неаполе больше населения, чем в Риге.
3. Зимой дни короче, а ночи длиннее.
4. Неаполь находится дальше к югу, чем Рига.
5. В Неаполе меньше дождей, чем в Риге.
6. В Неаполе больше жителей, чем в Риге.
7. В Санкт Петербурге так же много достопримечательностей, как и в Европе.
8. Самое красивое время года там – январь.
9. Санкт Петербург – один из самых великолепных городов в мире.
10. Многие здания там больше и лучше, чем в других европейских городах.
11. Прага – менее промышленный город, чем Лондон.
12. Лондон – менее романтичный, чем Париж.
13. В Москве столько же жителей, сколько в Лондоне.
14. Рим такой же красивый, как и Неаполь.
15. Этот город наименее безопасен днем.
16. В Нижневартовске столько же снега, сколько в Мегионе.
17. В Мегионе меньше магазинов.
18. В Нижневартовске больше уличного движения, чем в Мегионе.

Productivity standard –норма продуктивності

Material standard of living –матеріальний життєвий рівень

Input –вводний фактор продуктивності

Output rate –продуктивність

Economic incentive –економічний стимул

Incentive wage –прогресивна система заробітної плати

Profitability –прибутковість, рентабельність

Labor-saving process –процес, який економить працю

Endogenous matter –ендогенна (внутрішня) справа

Unskilled labor –некваліфікована праця

Over the last two centuries the material standard of living of the typical family has increased enormously in all of the world's industrialized countries. Much of this increase has been due to the invention of new, improved waysof making products. This causes an increase in productivity, which is output per unit of input employed. The apparently modest rate of increase of output per man-hour of labor of 2.0 per cent per year leads to a doubling of output per man-hour every 36 years.

Productivity in the United Kingdom has increased at approximately this rate over the last 100 years.

Productivity changes affect the supplies of commodities. Productivity changes are partly an endogenous response to economic signals and incentives and partly an exogenous consequence of spontaneous creative activity. Much of the economy's long-run ability to adjust to various disturbances that impingeon it depends on very-long-run changes being at least partly endogenous.

An invention is defined as the discovery of something new, such as a new production technique or a new product. An innovation is defined as the introduction of an invention into use. Innovation responds to economic incentives. New products and methods will not be introduced unless it appears profitable to do so, and a change in economic incentives can change the apparent profitability of various possible innovations.

Innovation can occur only when there has already been an invention. If there is a dramatic rise in labor costs, firms may now decide to take up some labor-saving process that hitherto has been ignored since its invention, but they cannot do so if the invention has not yet been made. In the very long run, what matters is the response of the economy to economic signals, such as changes in the relative prices both of consumer goods and of inputs. The extent to which invention responds to such incentives helps to determine the economy's responses.

An example will illustrate why the extent to which invention is endoge-nous matters.

Hypothesis 1: This is the age of electronics and automation, and scientists just go on inventing methods that replace unskilled labor with capital, thereby creating unemployment among the unskilled. The normal corrective of the price system is for the relative price of unskilled labor to fall, thus inducing a substitution in favour of unskilled labor until the unemployment is eliminated. But, according to this hypothesis, scientists are uninfluenced by the incentives of relative factor prices. Now assume that each new technique invented is absolutely more efficient than its predecessors in the sense that it uses less of all factors than its predecessors - but it also uses less unskilled labor relative to other inputs. Firms will now be motivated to adopt the absolutely more efficient new techniques, but in so doing they will adopt a factor combination that increases the unemployment among the unskilled.

Hypothesis 2: If unemployment amongst the unskilled drives down their relative wage, firms will be led to select from amongst existing techniques those that are more intensive in the use of unskilled labor. If there is still unemployment among the unskilled, their factor services will remain cheap and the profit incentive will cause the development of new techniques that substitute cheap unskilled labor for the more expensive factors.