Английский язык для специальных целей в экономической сфере. Практикум для студентов-магистров

upside down virtually overnight, and failing to plan truly is planning to fail.

Subsequently, we would predict that businesses will put a great deal more focus on their supply chain risk and resilience over the next year. For any businesses that have not begun this process yet, we would urge them to seriously consider it.

Are these statements true or false? Correct the false ones.

1.More and more people are now facing financial difficulties.

2.Brexit is likely to cause price increases for supermarkets and the customers they serve.

3.The ongoing move to online and home delivery, will worsen retailers’ margin challenges, while they contend with the increased need to compete on price to retain sales.

4.Businesses look to increase costs across their supply chain and logistics operations.

5.2020 saw rapidly-shrinking warehouse space, because of the rising popularity of online shopping, changing consumer demands, and businesses stockpiling in an attempt to insulate themselves from wider market turmoil.

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6.Increased home deliveries in lockdown and fluctuating traffic levels have thrown a spotlight on businesses’ carbon emissions, meaning that finding ways to sustainably cut emissions, without compromising in areas such as service quality, will rightly be a key priority for many.

7.We would predict that businesses will not focus on their supply chain risk and resilience over the next year.

Text 6. Coronavirus: No guarantee of quick economic

bounceback, warns Sunak

https://www.bbc.com/news/

Rishi Sunak said he hoped for a swift recovery, but it could take time for the UK economy to get back to normal."It takes time for people to get back to the habits that they had, there are still restrictions in place," he said.

His warning came as figures showed the number of people claiming unemployment benefit soared to 2.1 million in April.The jump of 856,500 claims in April reflected the impact of the first full month of lockdown, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

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The government has made some changes to who can claim work-related benefits during the pandemic, but this figure is one of a series that show the stress Covid-19 is putting on the jobs market.

'Jury's out'

Speaking to the Lords Economic Affairs Committee, Mr Sunak said figures from around the world where countries were progressively easing and lifting restrictions, suggested a full recovery could take time.

He said the "question that occupies" his mind was "what degree of long-term scarring is there on the economy" and that once restrictions begin to be lifted there will be the case of "what do we return to" and on that the "jury's out".

But he admitted he felt "all economic forecasters and economists would agree the longer the recession is, it is likely the degree of that scarring will be greater".

He said that even if the government can reopen retail in England as planned on the 1 June, there will still be restrictions on how people can shop. This will have an impact on how much they spend, and on how many people go out, Mr Sunak said.

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"I think in all cases it will take a little bit of time for things to get back to normal, even once we've reopened currently closed sectors," Mr Sunak added.

When quizzed on unemployment by the committee, Mr Sunak said he did not have a precise estimate for what the numbers would be at the end of the year.

However, he said: "Obviously, the impact pandemic will be severe."

Before the lockdown began, employment had hit a record high. In another indication of the bleak employment landscape, the number of job vacancies fell by nearly a quarter to 637,000 in the three months to April. Meanwhile, claims for universal credit - the benefit for working-age people in the UK - hit a record monthly level in the early weeks of lockdown.

Unemployed HR worker Jon Ellis-Fleming, of Keighley in West Yorkshire, had been with an outsourcing company for more than four years when he was made redundant. He left the firm on 8 March, hoping to spend some time at home with his partner Julia Paterson and their eight-month-old daughter Daisy while looking for a new job.

"The week after I officially left the company, Covid hit," he told the BBC. That meant that several promising job offers just evaporated as firms put their recruitment plans on hold. Jon

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applied for universal credit and jobseeker's allowance. He is due to receive his first payment of £600 later this month, while his partner receives £650 a month on maternity leave.

That leaves them with less than half of their former income - and with another mouth to feed as well."I've not been out of work in 10 years," he said. "I've never had any intention of being out of work that long."I can't help but wonder, if I'd been with the company two weeks longer, would furloughing have been an option?"The unemployment rate was estimated at 3.9%, slightly down on the previous quarter, the ONS said.The jobless figures only cover the first week of the lockdown and they are expected to worsen sharply in the coming months.

Jagjit Chadha, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, told the BBC: "We can reasonably expect unemployment to rise very quickly to something over 10% - something we haven't seen since the early 1990s."

Estimates based on returns for individual weeks suggest that the fall in the unemployment rate was mostly caused by the decrease in hours in the last week of March, with a much smaller decrease in the previous week, the ONS said.

In the final week of March, the total number of hours worked was about 25% fewer than in other weeks within the quarter. The government's jobs schemes succeeded in keeping the

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headline jobs numbers high, and jobless data still quite low up until the end of March. But there is evidence of the pandemic crisis impact starting to hit in the latest ONS jobs market release.

The number of job vacancies from February to April tumbled by 170,000 to 637,000 - a record quarterly fall. The claimant count jumped in April, while the average hours worked in a week fell sharply at the end of March.

So the signs of a significant downturn in the normal jobs market are there, but as is the impact of the extraordinary government support package. Unemployment would have shot through the roof without this support.

However, these numbers will get worse with next month's figures. The vacancy drop shows there are fewer jobs out there for those who do lose work. And there are real concerns as to what happens when the support starts to be phased away in August.

Are these statements true or false? Correct the false ones.

1.It might take long for the UK economy to get back to normal after corona crisis.

2.The state has made no changes to who can claim workrelated benefits during the pandemic.

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3.All economists would agree the longer the recession is, it is unlikely the degree of that "what do we return to" scarring will be greater.

4.Even if the government can reopen retail in England as planned, there will still be restrictions on how people can shop.

5.Before the lockdown began, employment had hit a record low.

6.The unemployment rate was estimated at 3.9%, slightly down on the previous quarter.

7.Unemployment would have shot through the roof without the government support.

Text 7. The Way We Measure the Economy Obscures What

Is Really Going On

By Heather Boushey

The New York Times, Oct. 28, 2019

Every quarter, we look to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis for new data on the total income and output of the economy. The nation’s topline indicator of economic performance is gross domestic product — the sum total of all that’s produced in our economy. If you pay attention to that

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indicator only, it would certainly seem like we’re now in the best of times: Gross domestic product has grown for 124 straight months, and we are now officially in the longest economic expansion in recorded American history.

Leaders manage by setting objectives, which is exactly what policymakers do when they point to rising gross domestic product as a measure of economic success. As Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric famously put it,

“What you measure is what you get.” But if you manage by the wrong measurement, it’s worse than having no metrics at all.

Mr. Welch, who understood this, also asked: “Are we measuring and rewarding the specific behavior we want?”.

While gross domestic product has always had flaws, it used to be a measurement that captured income gains across the economy. Today, when policymakers look to gross domestic product as a measure of their success, they are not seeing the whole picture. It is no longer good enough for what we need it to do.

The economist Simon Kuznets developed the first estimates of aggregate national income in the early 1930s at the request of the Commerce Department. In 1934, he and his team of researchers presented their findings to the Senate in a 300-page report. The data from that report provided Congress and the

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president with the first comprehensive snapshot of economic activity and led to the introduction of national income statistics in 1942. Nearly 30 years later, Kuznets received the Nobel

Prize in economics “for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth.”

In the decades following World War II, national accounts provided a measure that reflected economic progress throughout the country. From 1963 to 1979, as the economy grew, people at all levels — rich, poor, middle class — saw their income grow at about the same rate. Over that period, the economy grew at an average of 1.7 percent annually and most

Americans’ income growth stayed closed to the average. In fact, the poorest saw their incomes rise much faster than the average while the richest saw their incomes rise much slower. Incomes among the bottom half rose by 2.6 percent per year while the top 1 percent saw theirs rise by 1 percent.

Kuznets never intended for his national account scheme to become the country’s most relied upon measure of economic progress. In his original report to Congress, he wrote: “The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.” Kuznets understood that the tools he gave policymakers were limited. They didn’t take into account all the aspects a true measure of economic well-being

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would. By definition, national accounts tabulate only goods with a price tag, leaving out all the things we do for each other, like the unpaid time that parents spend caring for their children, or the unpaid time adult children spend caring for their aging parents.

There are other problems as well. When a factory spews toxic fumes into the surrounding air, this doesn’t get subtracted from national income, and we don’t count the negative effect on the lungs of all the people nearby. Worse yet, the money that is spent to clean up the air — and the money that is spent to care for the rise in asthma for the local population — gets counted as an increase in output.

Rising economic inequality since Kuznets’s era has made gross domestic product even less informative. Back then, an upward shift meant that incomes grew across the nation; today a rise is more likely to indicate sharp spikes in income for a relative few at the top.

The economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have done groundbreaking work to disaggregate the national accounts data to show how those at all income levels were faring year to year and over a longer span of time. Their data show that in the decades since 1980 (ending in 2016, the most recent year for which data are available), the aggregate

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