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  3. The world economy has been growing at its fastest for a generation. Money, goods and ideas move around the globe more freely tha

The world economy has been growing at its fastest for a generation. Money, goods and ideas move around the globe more freely tha

admin2015-09-30  63
问题     The world economy has been growing at its fastest for a generation. Money, goods and ideas move around the globe more freely than they have for at least a century maybe more than ever, when you think of modern communication and China’s re-emergence. So why all the gripes and grumbles? The problem, as some see it, is that workers in rich countries are not getting a fair whack. Their share of income has been shrinking for the past quarter of a century, most markedly in continental Europe and Japan. The new order may be just dandy for capitalists, but not for those who toil by hand or brain.
    In its semiannual World Economic Outlook, the IMF examines how trade, technology and immigration have stitched the world’s labour markets together at an astonishing rate, leaving rich country workers unsure of where they stand. Weighting each country’s workforce by its ratio of exports to GDP, the IMF estimates that global labour supply has in effect risen fourfold since 1980 as China, India and once-communist countries have opened up. Most of the extra workers got no further than secondary school(although the relative supply of graduates has gone up by 50%). With this surge of competition, you might expect labour’s share of the pie to shrink.
    In some cases, the competition is direct: workers cross borders to take jobs in rich countries. Although unwelcome in many places, immigrants’ share of the workforce has risen a lot in some European countries(notably Britain, Germany and Italy)and in America, where it is close to 15%. The more important channel, though, is trade: largely because of China, developing countries’ share of rich countries’ manufacturing imports has doubled since the early 1990s. " Offshoring"—shifting production, especially of intermediate goods and some services, abroad has been on the rise, although the IMF notes that it has grown more slowly than total trade.
    Globalisation is not the only possible reason why labour’s share has shrunk. New technologies have probably taken a few degrees off the workers’ slice too. Technological change had the biggest effect in Europe and Japan. In Anglo-Saxon countries(America, Australia, Britain and Canada)it was much smaller.
    The effects of labour globalisation were most evident in Anglo-Saxon and small European countries. However, it has touched different places in different ways. In Europe the effects of offshoring and immigration have been more marked than in the Anglo-Saxon world; in Japan they have scarcely registered. The labour-intensive goods that rich countries import have fallen in price, pressing down on the workers’ share. But this has been broadly offset by price falls in the capital-intensive goods they export. In Japan these prices fell by enough to yield an overall net gain in the labour share.
Labor’s share of income in rich countries has been shrinking mainly because of______.
选项 A、the rapid increase of global labour supply
B、the low educational level of extra workers
C、the opening up of once-communist countries
D、the higher ratio of each country’s exports to GDP
答案A
解析 根据第二段最后一句“With this surge of competition，you might expect labour’s share of thepie to shrink”，A应为答案。
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