Чтение литературы по специальности на английском языке. Теория и практика информационной обработки текста. Учебное пособие для студентов факультета эк

How the Internet Can Make Agricultural Markets in the Developing World More Efficient

WHEN the internet took off in the mid-1990s, it was often claimed that it would improve price transparency, cut out middlemen and make markets more efficient. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence for this, just as there is for similar claims about mobile phones. Empirical data on the impact of these new technologies increasingly support the thesis.

Macroeconomic studies suggest that the internet and mobile phones boost growth. The effect is bigger in developing countries than developed ones, due to the paucity of existing communications infrastructure. The effect also seems to be bigger for the internet than for mobile phones. In a study published in 2009, Christine Zhen-Wei Qiang of the World Bank found that an increase of ten percentage points in mobile-phone adoption increased growth in GDP per person by 0,8 percentage points in a developing country, and by 0,6 percentage points in a developed one. For dial-up internet access, the figures were 1,1 percentage points and 0,75 percentage points respectively; for broadband internet, 1,4 percentage points and 1,2 percentage points.

Critics of such analyses contend that it is difficult to tell whether the adoption of new technologies is promoting growth, or vice versa. Researchers have responded by examining detailed microeconomic data to show how the spread of technology directly affects the prices of particular goods.

By examining historical data for the price of fish as mobilephone coverage was extended down the coast of Kerala in southern India between 1997 and 2001, for example, Robert Jensen of Harvard University showed that access to mobile phones made markets much more efficient, eliminating wasted catches and thereby bringing down consumer prices by 4% and increasing fishermen’s profits by 8%. Similarly, Jenny Aker of the University of California at Berkeley analysed grain markets in Niger to see how the phasing-in of mobile-phone coverage between 2001 and 2006 affected prices. She found that it reduced price variations between one market and another by at least 6,4%, and more in remote and hard-to-reach mar-

101

kets. With transaction costs cut, prices for consumers were lower and profits for traders higher.

In a forthcoming paper1, Aparajita Goyal of the World Bank has carried out a corresponding study for the internet by examining how the gradual introduction of internet kiosks providing price information affected the market for soya beans in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Farmers in the region sell their soya beans to intermediaries in open auctions at government-regulated wholesale markets called mandis, a system that was set up in order to protect farmers from unscrupulous buyers. The intermediaries then sell on the produce to food-processing companies. The problem with this approach for the farmers is that the traders have a far better idea about the prices prevailing in different markets and being offered by processing companies. With only a few traders at each mandi, they can easily collude to ensure that they pay less than the fair market price; they can then boost their profits by selling on the beans at a higher price.

ITC Limited, an Indian company that is one of the largest buyers of soya beans, felt it was paying over the odds, but was unable to monitor the traders closely. Starting in October 2000 it began to introduce a network of internet kiosks, called e-choupal, in villages in Madhya Pradesh. (Choupal means “village gathering place” in Hindi.) By the end of 2004 a total of 1,704 kiosks had been set up, each of which served its host village and four others within a fivekilometre (three-mile) radius. The kiosks displayed the minimum and maximum price paid for soya beans at 60 mandis, updated once a day, along with agricultural information and weather forecasts. ITC also posted the price it was prepared to pay for soya beans of a particular quality bought direct from farmers at 45 “hubs” (mostly in the same towns as mandis). By setting up the kiosks, ITC enabled farmers to check that the prices being offered at their local mandi were in line with prices elsewhere. It also gave them the option to sell direct.

1 “Information, Direct Access to Farmers, and Rural Market Performance in Central India”, by Aparajita Goyal // American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, forthcoming. http://www.aeaweb.org/ forthcoming/output/accepted_APP.php

102

Bean there, done that

To evaluate the impact all of this had on prices, Ms Goyal used historical data from mandis and the locations and installation dates of the kiosks. She found that the presence of kiosks in a district was associated with an instant and persistent increase of 1,7% in the average price paid at mandis in that district. As expected, the availability of price information increased the level of competition between the traders, raising prices and reducing the variation in prices between nearby mandis. Farmers’ profits increased by 33%, and the cultivation of soya beans increased by an average of 19% in districts with kiosks. And by buying some produce direct, ITC reduced its costs, which paid for the kiosks.

All this supports the anecdotal evidence that the internet can indeed make agricultural markets more efficient, just as mobile phones can. But whereas the expansion of mobile-phone access is now rapid and commercially self-sustaining – even very poor farmers can benefit from having a phone, and find the money to buy one – the same is not true of the internet. Its use requires a higher degree of literacy, for one thing, and computers cost more than handsets. The e-choupal approach, in which a company pays for the kiosks, offers one model; another is for entrepreneurs to resell access to the internet from village kiosks, which is how mobile phones first caught on. Ms Qiang’s figures suggest that in the long run, the internet could have an even greater impact on economic growth than mobile phones did. But that will depend upon finding sustainable business models to encourage its spread in the poorest parts of the world.

Jan 7th 2010 From The Economist print edition

Задание 28

28.1.Прочитайте текст.

28.2.Составьте реферат-конспект данного текста.

103

The Secret of Canadian Banking: Common Sense?

Laurence Booth1

The functions of a financial system

It is not possible to understand banking in isolation from the rest of the financial system, since there are a variety of functions within the financial system, not all of which need to be regulated in the same way, or even at all. Only by understanding these functions can we understand what makes banking unique, and whether an entity or a function needs to be regulated.

In Canada, as elsewhere, most financial market regulation came out of the severe problems caused by the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, and the perception that unfettered free capital markets were a primary contributing factor to both. In Canada, these regulations were mainly blunt instruments focused on regulating specific entities. This functional separation allowed the regulator to monitor the institution closely and enforce professional standards unique to that type of institution. The Canadian system was based on “four pillars”: the chartered banks, the insurance companies, the trust companies2 and the securities dealers. Each had their own regulator, own set of professional standards and own economic justification, with strict barriers between each of the pillars to prevent cross-pillar competition. To understand how this works, look at the basic schematic in Figure 1 (Booth & Cleary 2007).

Intermediation is the process of bringing lenders (savers) and borrowers together. Non-market transactions are not significant economically, which leaves the two major channels of intermediation through market and financial intermediaries. Market intermediaries basically make markets work; such institutions are normally referred to as brokers or securities firms. The key to understanding them is

1Laurence Booth is Professor of Finance, DBA, MBA, MA (Indiana University), BS (London School of Economics) and holds the CIT Chair in Structured Finance at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

2Trust companies were equivalent to UK building societies or US savings and loans.

104

that, traditionally, they do not take ownership of the securities issued by the ultimate borrower: they simply facilitate the exchange. In this way the ultimate borrower issues direct securities through the market intermediary, which facilitates their sale to the ultimate savers.

We can all recognise the market intermediaries as the securities firms either making markets through organised stock exchanges or through the over-the-counter bond market. Either way, their essential function is to provide liquidity to facilitate trading in the secondary markets, and to arrange primary financing through public offerings of securities. Until relatively recently such functions required little capital, since the essence of their function was a brokerage function and they did not take ownership of the underlying securities; instead they charged a fee for arranging the transaction. For this reason, in Canada until 1984 the securities firms were organised as partnerships and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE, now TSX) was mutually owned by the securities firms1. In this way they were self-regulated by the Investment Dealers Association (IDA) and the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC)2.

1In 1984–1985, I participated in a series of hearings before the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) into allowing the securities firms to become limited companies, list their stock on the TSE and allow the banks into the discount brokerage function.

2In Canada, securities regulation is a provincial responsibility, but the OSC is the lead regulator.

105

An important key to understanding securities firms is that their income traditionally comes from fee-based compensation. This gives rise to the common description of securities firms as shortterm deal orientated, since they are only as good as their last deal. As I will show later, this deal-orientated culture explains a fundamental difference between Canadian and most US and UK banks.

Financial intermediaries, in contrast, don’t make markets work, they substitute for markets. This is represented schematically by the solid box around financial intermediaries, since the savings that are channeled through them are their direct liabilities. They, in turn, lend the funds to the ultimate borrowers and make their profits not by brokerage fees, but through principal trades – that is, they take the direct securities on to their books as assets and the indirect securities that they issue on to their books as liabilities. Their profits then come from the spread between the costs of their liabilities versus the income on their assets.

We can recognise the three key financial intermediaries as the banks, the trusts and the insurance companies. Each has its own function.

Bank risk

The previous section discussed what determines an efficient financial system. This is important since stability is only one part of the requirement of an efficient financial system. In fact, in economic terms, the three components of an efficient financial system do not explicitly include stability as an objective, since it is normally judged to be a by-product of the other dimensions. For example, an informationally efficient financial market should result in stable prices since all material information is then revealed and incorporated into market prices. However, the crisis of 2008–2009 has revealed that Homo economicus may not be as rational and allseeing as assumed by financial theory. Further, we have just seen that the Canadian banks now control three of the four pillars of the Canadian financial system, so their stability is de facto critical for the stability of the system, and by any criteria they are now too big to fail.

106

Off balance sheet: contingent assets of US$100

To understand what drives stability in the banking system we have to recognise all facets of a bank’s operations. Figure 2 includes the major elements through a simple example.

The stability and profitability of the bank depends on its management in four key areas:

1.Liquidity management constitutes holding required reserves to meet unanticipated withdrawals.

2.Asset management is the choice of risk involved in a bank’s loan portfolio, and its contingent liabilities in terms of lines of credit, etc.

3.Liability management is the way in which the bank decides to fund its loan and securities portfolio.

4.Capital management is the amount of permanent funds (capital) supporting the deposit base or, alternatively, the amount of leverage the bank uses.

How stable the bank is depends on the way in which each of these aspects of bank management interacts. In the example in Figure 2, the bank has common equity of $100 underpinning its total assets of $1100 for a leverage multiplier of 11X or capital ratio of 9,09%. A riskier loan portfolio would require more capital – that is, a lower leverage rate. In the same way, a lower risk loan portfolio would mean lower capital. In this way asset management has its corollary in capital management.

There is also a trade-off between liquidity and liability management. A bank funding with a heavy dependence on the money

107

market and short-term securities would need higher liquidity both in terms of immediate reserves at the central bank and marketable securities that can easily be sold. This is to forestall a run on the bank. Conversely, a bank with limited liquidity has to make sure that it has a very stable source of funds. In this way liquidity management goes hand in hand with liability management. These liquidity problems are reduced in Canada since, for reasons I will explain shortly, most of their funding comes from a captive deposit base covered by deposit insurance from the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation (CDIC). In considering why Canadian banks have been so stable we have to understand that there is no silver bullet: their stability stems from all four areas of bank management and the competitive banking market in Canada.

WORLD ECONOMICS

Vol. 10, No. 3 July – September 2009

108

ЛИТЕРАТУРА

1.Алефиренко, Н.Ф. Теория языка. – М. : Academia, 2004. –

С. 367.

2.Банникова, Л.С. Методикаобученияпоисковомучтению: автореф. дисс. … канд. пед. наук. – Л., 1981. – С. 21.

3.Барабанова, Г.В. Управление процессом обучения пониманию английских научно-технических текстов по специальности в неязыковом вузе : дисс. … канд. пед. наук. – Севастополь, 1990. – С. 165.

4.Богин, Г.И. Схемы действий читателя при понимании текста. – Калинин : КГУ, 1989. – С. 69.

5.Брудный, А.А. Понимание как элемент психологии чтения. – М. : Знание, 1975. – С. 234.

6.Вейзе, А.А. Смысловая компрессия текста в учебных целях. – Минск, 1982. – С. 86.

7.Вейзе, А.А. Чтение, реферирование и аннотирование иностранного текста. – М. : Высшая школа, 1985. – С. 127.

8.Ворожбитова, А.А. Теория текста. – М. : Высшая школа, 2005. – С. 365.

9.Гальперин, И.Р. Текст как объект лингвистического исследования. – М. : Наука, 1981. – С. 139.

10.Иванов, М.М. Техника эффективного запоминания в бизнесе, учебе, деловом общении и повседневной жизни. – М. : АО «МЕНАТЕП-ИНФОРМ», 1996. – С. 224.

11.Ивин, А.А. Логика. – М. : ФАИР-ПРЕСС, 2002. – С. 318.

12.Крупнов, В.Н. Пособие по общественно-политической

иофициально-деловой лексике. – М. : Высшая школа, 1984. –

С. 224.

13.Михельсон, Т.Н., Успенская, Н.В. Как писать поанглийски научные статьи, рефераты и рецензии. – СПб. : Специальная литература, 1995. – С. 166.

14.Протасеня, Е.П. Как сдать “IELTS”. – М. : ООО

«Издательство АСТ», 2003. – C. 237.

15.Татаринов, В.А. Методология научного перевода. – М. : Московский Лицей, 2007. – С. 384.

109

16.Часов, В.А. Психологические принципы быстрого чтения. – Л. : Лениздат, 1978. – С. 31.

17.Economics / Walter J. Wessels. – New York : Barron’s, 2000. – P. 594.

18.Johnson, C. Market leader: banking and finance. – Harlow : Pearson Education, 2000. – P. 96.

19.Pilbeam, A. Market leader: international management. – Harlow : Pearson Education, 2000. – P. 96.

20.World investment report 2005: transnational corporations and the internationalization of R&D. – New York; Geneva : United Nations Publications, 2005. – P. 332.

21.Carey, D. Lessons from Master Acquirers: A CEO Roundtable on Making Mergers Succeed // Harvard Business Review. – 2000. – May–June.

22.Cowling, K., Tomlinson, Philip R. Globalisation and corporate power // Contributions to political economy. – 2005. – Volume

24.– Pp. 33–54.

23.Paran, A. Reading in EFL: facts and fictions // ELT Journal. – Volume 50. – № 1. – Pp. 25–34.

24.Malkiel, Burton G. Reflections on the Efficient Market Hypothesis: 30 Years Later // The Financial Review. – 2005. – Volume

40.– № 1. – Pp. 1–9.

110