《经济学人》英文版读译--砖块积累练习1：

1.Global ageing

A billion shades of grey

An ageing economy will be a slower and more unequal one—unless policy starts changing now

WARREN BUFFETT, who on May 3rd hosts the folksy extravaganza that is Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholders' meeting, is an icon of American capitalism. At 83, he also epitomises a striking demographic trend: for highly skilled people to go on working well into what was once thought to be old age. Across the rich world, well-educated people increasingly work longer than the less-skilled. Some 65% of American men aged 62-74 with a professional degree are in the workforce, compared with 32% of men with only a high-school certificate. In the European Union the pattern is similar.

This gap is part of a deepening divide between the well-educated well-off and the unskilled poor that is slicing through all age groups. Rapid innovation has raised the incomes of the highly skilled while squeezing those of the unskilled. Those at the top are working longer hours each year than those at the bottom. And the well-qualified are extending their working lives, compared with those of less-educated people (see article). The consequences, for individuals and society, are profound.

Older, wiser and a lot of them

The world is on the cusp of a staggering rise in the number of old people, and they will live longer than ever before. Over the next 20 years the global population of those aged 65 or more will almost double, from 600m to 1.1 billion. The experience of the 20th century, when greater longevity translated into more years in retirement rather than more years at work, has persuaded many observers that this shift will lead to slower economic growth and “secular stagnation”, while the swelling ranks of pensioners will bust government budgets.

But the notion of a sharp division between the working young and the idle old misses a new trend, the growing gap between the skilled and the unskilled. Employment rates are falling among younger unskilled people, whereas older skilled folk are working longer. The divide is most extreme in America, where well-educated baby-boomers are putting off retirement while many less-skilled younger people have dropped out of the workforce.

Policy is partly responsible. Many European governments have abandoned policies that used to encourage people to retire early. Rising life expectancy, combined with the replacement of generous defined-benefit pension plans with stingier defined-contribution ones, means that even the better-off must work longer to have a comfortable retirement. But the changing nature of work also plays a big role. Pay has risen sharply for the highly educated, and those people continue to reap rich rewards into old age because these days the educated elderly are more productive than their predecessors. Technological change may well reinforce that shift: the skills that complement computers, from management expertise to creativity, do not necessarily decline with age.

This trend will benefit not just fortunate oldies but also, in some ways, society as a whole. Growth will slow less dramatically than expected; government budgets will be in better shape, as high earners pay taxes for longer. Rich countries with lots of well-educated older people will find the burden of ageing easier to bear than places like China, where half of all 50-to-64-year-olds did not complete primary-school education.

At the other end of the social scale, however, things look grim. Manual work gets harder as people get older, and public pensions look more attractive to those on low wages and the unemployed. In the lexicon of popular hate-figures, work-shirking welfare queens breeding at the taxpayer's expense may be replaced by deadbeat grand ads collecting taxpayer handouts while their hard-working contemporaries strive on.

Nor are all the effects on the economy beneficial. Wealthy old people will accumulate more savings, which will weaken demand. Inequality will increase and a growing share of wealth will eventually be transferred to the next generation via inheritance, entrenching the division between winners and losers still further.

One likely response is to impose higher inheritance taxes. So long as they replaced less-fair taxes, that might make sense. They would probably encourage old people to spend their cash rather than salt it away. But governments should focus not on redistributing income but on generating more of it by reforming retirement and education.

Age should no longer determine the appropriate end of a working life. Mandatory retirement ages and pension rules that discourage people from working longer should go. Welfare should reflect the greater opportunities open to the higher-skilled. Pensions should become more progressive. At the same time, this trend underlines the importance of increasing public investment in education at all stages of life, so that more people acquire the skills they need to thrive in the modern labour market. Today, many governments are understandably loth to spend money retraining older folk who are likely to retire soon. But if people can work for longer, that investment makes much more sense. Deadbeat 60-year-olds are unlikely to become computer scientists, but they could learn useful vocational skills, such as caring for the growing number of very old people.

Old power

How likely are governments to make these changes? Look around the rich world today, and it is hard to be optimistic. The swelling ranks of older voters, and their disproportionate propensity to vote, have left politicians keener to pander to them than to implement disruptive reforms. Germany, despite being the fastest-ageing country in Europe, plans to cut the statutory retirement age for some people. In America both Social Security (the public pension scheme) and the fast-growing system of disability benefits remain untouched by reform. Politicians need to convince less-skilled older voters that it is in their interests to go on working. Doing so will not be easy. But the alternative—economic stagnation and even greater inequality—is worse.

2.

THE CLIENTELE OF the Le Amor retirement home in the Fragrant Hills of western Beijing are no ordinary folk. Staff boast that one of them taught President Hu Jintao when he was at university. Another is the descendant of a nutritionist who worked for the Empress Dowager Cixi, China's last great imperial ruler. A third is a former senior official in the party's top anti-corruption body. By the grim standards of such homes in China, it seems they are being treated well. If they wish, they can rent a suite of rooms, including one for a live-in servant. All rooms have an emergency button.

The home's director is coy about how she secured such a desirable rural location for her $10m venture, away from the city's downtown smog. Le Amor is one of only a handful of privately run retirement homes in the capital aimed at the well-to-do. Looking after the elderly is a business in its infancy in China, where that task usually falls to the offspring, if any. But Le Amor's market has very attractive prospects.

Over the next few years China will undergo a huge demographic shift. The share of people over 60 in the total population will increase from 12.5% in 2010 to 20% in 2020. By 2030 their number will double from today's 178m. The dependency ratio—the number of people of non-working age, both young and old, as a proportion of those of working age—will bottom out between 2012 and 2015 at an exceptionally low level before rebounding, says a report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Put another way, China's “demographic dividend”—the availability of lots of young workers—which helped fuel its growth will soon begin to disappear. The overall population will start to grow faster than that of working age. One trigger for this could be a sharp economic slowdown. Many Chinese have recently become familiar with the “Lewis turning point”, named after a 20th-century economist from St Lucia, Arthur Lewis, who said that industrial wages start to rise quickly when a country's rural labour surplus dries up.

One way this will show up is in a proliferation of places like Le Amor. A lot of schools will close down. Wang Feng of the Brookings Institution notes that China's primary-school enrolment dropped from 25.3m in 1995 to 16.7m in 2008. Revoking the one-child policy would probably not make a big difference. Chinese couples have small families mainly because children are expensive, Mr Wang argues. China's rapid ageing, combined with a shrinking labour force, will “fundamentally reshape the Chinese economy and society”, he suggests. In the next decade the number of people aged 20-24 will drop by 50%, Mr Wang predicts.

Optimists believe China still has several more years before the economic impact of an ageing population becomes apparent. China's commerce minister, Chen Deming, said in March 2010 that the country could still enjoy another decade of “demographic dividends”. In a report last year Morgan Stanley pointed to 80m-100m surplus labourers in the countryside who could be employed in urban areas (although as this special report has argued, that might not be easy). It also expressed optimism about continuing productivity gains from rising levels of education and technology use.

Still, the redrawing of China's economic map is unmistakable. A decade ago, impoverished migrants gathered outside factories in cities like Dongguan, desperate for work. Now Dongguan's streets are full of banners and notices advertising jobs. Wage rises are beginning to accelerate. According to Stephen Green of Standard Chartered, they have risen by 9-15% this year in the Pearl River Delta around Dongguan. Part of the increase is government-driven. Local authorities have been raising minimum wages, and the new five-year plan calls for increases averaging 13% annually, nearly twice as fast as the target for GDP growth. But the main reason is a diminishing labour supply, helped in the delta by an uptick in labour activism. A local academic says that a strike at a Honda car-parts factory last year provoked more than 200 copycat strikes and protests.

Manufacturing is beginning to move inland to areas where labour is more plentiful and cheaper. Chongqing has been a big beneficiary. Morgan Stanley says the city is turning into the largest laptop manufacturing base in Asia. Its electronics industry is expected to create hundreds of thousands of jobs. Foreigners invested $6.3 billion in Chongqing in 2010, up by 58% on the year before.

Meanwhile, local governments across the country will have to cope with a fast-rising population of retired people whose pensions, if any, will have to be paid for by contributions from a shrinking working population. The central government has been trying to help, introducing a rural pension scheme that is due to cover the whole of the countryside by 2020. In rural areas the dependency ratio will rise far more steeply than in cities as young people move out and the elderly stay behind. But again money is a problem. As with schools and medical services, the central government makes the plans but leaves it to local governments to put up the lion's share of funding.

In the cities decent pensions are almost as rare, except among workers in the privileged state sector. In 2008 only 17% of migrants in urban areas were enrolled in any pension scheme at all, the government admits. Young urban couples, many of them without siblings, will find themselves with four parents to look after and will themselves have only one child (known as the 4-2-1 phenomenon). If they are sensible, they will save hard to prepare for such a future, which will not help the government's efforts to shift China towards more consumption-led growth.

A big increase in the retirement age is overdue. In practice this is now around 56. But the official age of 60 for men and 50 for women (55 for civil servants) has not changed since 1951, when average life expectancy was 46 compared with today's 73. Like their counterparts in the West, many workers groan about having to plod on for longer. Online polls, which are likely to reflect the views of younger people, have found strong opposition to any rise in the retirement age. Many fear that it could make it even harder for university graduates to find jobs (last year 6.3m students graduated from Chinese universities, up from 1m in 1999, so competition is fierce). When French workers went on strike last year over plans to raise their retirement age, officials in China hastily denied reports that they were planning to do anything of the sort. The people's will is almost as much of an obstacle to reform in China as the party's.