经济学人14

英语学习_（6-10）《经济学⼈》中英对照_必备弃我去者，昨⽇之⽇不可留乱我⼼者，今⽇之⽇多烦忧TEXT 6Travelling with baggage背着⾏囊去旅⾏Feb 16th 2006From The Economist print edition（1）FEW modern travel writers excite more hostility and awe than Sir ★Wilfred Thesiger[1], who died in 2003. Despising the “drab uniformity of the modern world”, Sir Wilfred ★slogged across [2] Africa and Asia, especially Arabia, on animals and on foot, immersing himself in tribal societies. He delighted in killing—lions in Sudan in the years before the second world war, Germans and Italians during it. He disliked “soft”living and “★intrusive[3]”women and revered murderous savages, to whom he gave guns. He thought educating the working classes a waste of good servants. He kicked his dog. His journeys were more notable as feats of ★masochistic[4] endurance than as exploration. Yet his first two books, “Arabian Sands”, about his crossing of the Empty Quarter, and “The Marsh Arabs”, about southern Iraq, have a ★terse[5] brilliance about them. As records of ancient cultures on the ★cusp[6] of ★oblivion[7], they are unrivalled.现代游记作家鲜有⼈能⽐2003年去世的威福瑞?塞西格爵⼠更令⼈敬畏。

高考政治真题复习及答案政治主观试题越来越受到广大师生的重视，然而在我们的教学和考试中学生最怕，失分最多的依然是主观题。

下面小编给大家整理了关于高考政治真题复习及答案，欢迎大家阅读!高考政治真题复习及答案一、选择题1、16年海南4.据研究，每一位消费者身后大约有250个亲朋好友。

如果赢得了一位消费者的好感，就意味着赢得了250个人的好感;反之，如果得罪了一位消费者，也就意味着得罪了250个人。

这就是商场中的“250定律”。

据此，企业应该C①以消费者利益为经营目标，扩大市场②自觉遵守市场道德，坚持诚信经营③提高生产能力，确保市场经营④实施品牌战略，树立良好企业形象A. ①②B.①③C.②④D.③④2、16年海南5.受销量下降、原材料价格上涨的影响，我国某电视机生产企业2015年的利润率仅为1%。

为提高利润率，该企业采取的措施是D①发行企业债券，扩大企业生产规模②提高产品价格，抵消原材料价格的上涨③优化管理流程，降低生产成本④调整产品结构，满足多种消费需求A. ①②B.①③C.②④D.③④3、16年天津5. 大多市场风险是可以提高保险手段化解的。

以食品安全责任险为例，企业投保后一旦出现问题，保险公司可以按约及时补偿受害人，同时保险公司“连餐馆用啥碗都管”，有利于督促企业安全管理。

食品安全责任险C①是社会保险的重要组成部分②发挥了商业保险的经济补偿功能③是政府规范市场经济秩序的重要方式④促进食品企业提高产品质量，诚信经营A.①②B.③④C.②④D.①③4、16年浙江某市政府采取“一企一策”的办法推动“僵尸企业”问题的解决。

对符合破产条件的企业及时引入破产程序，对兼并重组后可以重生的企业促其兼并重组，对无意愿无能力继续生产的企业依法收回用地，盘活存量土地，从而促进了该市经济的快速发展。

回答第26-27题。

26.上述材料表明 ( D )①政府主要通过行政手段处置僵尸企业②破产有利于淘汰落后企业③破产和兼并有助于压缩企业规模④兼并可以提高企业和整个社会的资源利用效率A ①②B ①③C ③④ D②④5、16年陕西15. 近年来，服装企业越来越重视品牌建设。

《经济学人》：科学怎么了导读：最新一期《经济学人》于10月正式出刊，本期封面文章是《科学怎么了》。

科学研究改变了世界，然而各种学术不正之风正阻碍人类认识世界，现在它该改变自己了。

一个简单的思想支撑着整个科学体系：“信任但要核实”，任何结论都需要接受实践的检验，这一简单且强大的思想促成了大量知识的产生。

17世纪以来，现代科技让世界发生了翻天覆地的变化，人类的生活也变得越来越好。

但是成功会滋生骄傲，现代科学家更关注信任和忽视了核实，这对整个科学界以及人类都将造成伤害。

许多发现都源自劣质的实验和糟糕的分析，而这样的发现充斥着学术界。

生物科技风投资本家有一个经验法则：一半公开发表的科研成果都无法复制，而这还是乐观的估计。

去年生物科技公司安进公司发现，在关于癌症研究的53项重大成果中，只有6项可被复制。

而稍早前，拜耳制药公司的一个团队重新实验了67篇有重要影响力的论文，最终成功的只有四分之一。

一位重量级计算机科学家焦虑的表示，在他的领域里四分之三的论文都毫无意义。

2000-2010年期间，应用于临床的研究专利大约有80000份被撤销，因为它们是错误的。

这些有缺陷的研究并没有伤及人们的生命，因为其中大部分没有机会上市，但是它却浪费了资金并消耗着一些世界上最优秀人才的精力。

阻碍社会进步的机会成本很难被量化，但是很可能非常大，而且还在不断上升。

一个原因是科技界的竞争。

50年代，在第二次世界大战大获成功后，现代科学研究初具规模，然而那时它仍是少数人的消遣，全体科学家人数也就几十万。

然而此后这个队伍不断膨胀，最新统计，活跃的科研人员约有六百万到七百万，科学家失去了对自我监督和质量管控的兴趣，“发表或毁灭”统治了学术界。

对工作岗位的竞争更加残酷，2012年美国全职教授平均年收入为13.5万美元，超过法官。

每一个学术岗位就有六个新毕业的博士争取。

如今核实(重复其他人的研究结论)对促进研究者的职业发展毫无帮助，然而如果不核实，不可靠的发现必将造成误导。

国际经济学_首都经济贸易大学中国大学mooc课后章节答案期末考试题库2023年1.一个大国最优关税的实施会引起（）参考答案:以上皆正确2.美联储的数量宽松型货币政策可能会导致美元贬值。

参考答案:正确3.由于资本管制等因素，汇率往往偏离利率平价。

参考答案:正确4.经常账户顺差表示该账户下，贷方余额减去借方余额大于零。

参考答案:正确5.偏好风险的投资者，对未来的即期汇率有确定的预期。

参考答案:正确6.美国的劳动者通常（）参考答案:反对美国对外投资7.跨国公司存在的基本原因是（）参考答案:其全球生产和销售网络具有竞争优势8.脑力流失（brain drain）是指（）参考答案:高技能员工从发展中国家流向发达国家9.开放宏观经济下，一国外部平衡目标就是国际收支平衡。

参考答案:正确10.开放宏观经济环境下，内外平衡目标有时候是有矛盾的。

参考答案:正确11.财政政策是需求管理政策，而货币政策不是。

参考答案:错误12.蒙代尔分配法则的核心是财政政策和货币政策在实现内外平衡方面的分工。

参考答案:正确13.有效市场的含义是，市场参与者众多。

参考答案:错误14.在蒙代尔分配法则中，用货币供给量代表货币政策。

参考答案:正确15.外汇管制是支出转换型政策。

参考答案:正确16.中国国际收支双顺差的意思是“经常账户顺差，资本与金融账户顺差”。

参考答案:正确17.错误与遗漏账户是一个交易账户。

参考答案:错误18.顺差对一国是好的，多多益善。

参考答案:错误19.中国出口外汇储备增加了，表明中国国际清偿能力增加了。

参考答案:正确20.顺差往往带来该国货币带来升值的压力。

参考答案:正确21.支出增减型政策可以理解为财政政策或者货币政策。

参考答案:正确22.斯旺模型中，外部平衡的含义是经常项目平衡。

参考答案:正确23.如果一个国家的生产可能性曲线是凹向原点的，那么这个国家在以下哪种商品上是机会成本递增的（）参考答案:商品A和B24.社区无差异曲线的特点是（）参考答案:以上都对25.产品X对Y的边际替代率指的是（）参考答案:在同一条无差异曲线上，多生产1单位的X所必须放弃的Y的数量26.对本章生产的机会成本递增阐述错误的是（）参考答案:生产要素投入比例不变27.以下关于一个国家封闭条件下的均衡，哪项表述不正确（）参考答案:它的消费点位于生产可能性曲线的里面28.亚当·斯密认为，国际贸易的基础是（）参考答案:绝对优势29.外凸的生产可能性曲线表明生产过程中的机会成本（）参考答案:递增30.按照比较优势的原则，劳动丰裕的国家应该进口（）参考答案:资本密集型产品31.以下哪项不是重商主义倡导的观点（）参考答案:自由贸易32.比较优势理论是（）提出的参考答案:大卫·李嘉图33.如果国家A每1单位劳动时间可以生产3单位X或者3单位Y，国家B每1单位劳动时间可以生产1单位X或者3单位Y，那么（）参考答案:国家A在生产X上具有比较优势34.李嘉图解释比较优势理论的基础是（）参考答案:劳动价值论35.两个国家相对产品价格的差异可能是基于（）参考答案:以上都正确36.假定机会成本不变，大国和小国进行贸易（）参考答案:小国可能获得全部贸易利益37.如果国家A每1单位劳动时间可以生产3单位X或者3单位Y，国家B每1单位劳动时间可以生产1单位X或者3单位Y，如果国家A拿3单位X 交换3单位Y，那么（）参考答案:国家B获利6单位Y38.一个贸易上的小国不具备以下哪个特征:（）参考答案:地理面积上是小国39.中国国际收支顺差最大的贡献者是贸易顺差。

Digest Of The. Economist. 2006(4-5)Hot to trotA new service hopes to do for texting what Skype did for voice callsTALK is cheap—particularly since the appearance of voice-over-internet services such as Skype. Such services, which make possible very cheap (or even free) calls by routing part or all of each call over the internet, have forced traditional telecoms firms to cut their prices. And now the same thing could be about to happen to mobilephone text messages, following the launch this week of Hotxt, a British start-up.Users download the Hotxt software to their handsets, just as they would a game or a ringtone. They choose a user name, and can then exchange as many messages as they like with other Hotxt users for £1 ($1.75) per week. The messages are sent as data packets across the internet, rather than being routed through operators' textmessaging infrastructure. As a result, users pay only a tiny data-transport charge, typically of a penny or so per message. Since text messages typically cost 10p, this is a big saving—particularly for the cost-conscious teenagers at whom the service is aimed.Most teenagers in Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, pay for their mobile phones on a “pre-paid” basis, rather than having a monthly contract with a regular bill. Pre-paid tariffs are far more expensive: bundles of free texts and other special deals, which can reduce the cost of text messaging, are generally not available. For a teenager who sends seven messages a day, Hotxt can cut the cost of texting by 75%, saving £210 per year, says Doug Richard, the firm's co-founder. For really intensive text-messagers, the savings could be even bigger: Josh Dhaliwal of mobileYouth, a market-research firm, says that some teenagers—chiefly boys aged 15-16 and girls aged 14-15—are “supertexters” who send as many as 50 messages per day.While this sounds like good news for users, it could prove painful for mobile operators. Text-messaging accounts for around 20% of a typical operator's revenues. With margins on text messages in excess of 90%, texting also accounts for nearly half of an operator's profits. Mr Richard is confident that there is no legal way that operators can block his service; they could raisedata-transport costs, but that would undermine their own efforts to push new services. Hotxt plans to launch in other countries soon.“The challenge is getting that initial momentum,” says Mr Dhaliwal. Hotxt needs to persuade people to sign up, so that they will persuade their friends to sign up, and so on. Unlike Skype, Hotxt is not free, so users may be less inclined to give it a try. But as Skype has also shown, once a disruptive, low-cost communications service starts to spread, it can quickly become very big indeed. And that in turn can lead to lower prices, not just for its users, but for everyone.A discerning viewA new way of processing X-rays gives much clearer imagesX-RAYS are the mysterious phenomenon for which Wilhelm Röntgen was awarded the first Nobel prize in physics, in 1901. Since then, they have shed their mystery and found widespread use in medicine and industry, where they are used to revealthe inner properties of solid bodies.Some properties, however, are more easily discerned than others. Conventional Xray imaging relies on the fact that different materials absorb the radiation to different degrees. In a medical context, for example, bones absorb X-rays readily, and so show up white on an X-radiograph, which is a photographic negative. But Xrays are less good at discriminating between different forms of soft tissue, such as muscles, tendons, fat and blood vessels. That, however, could soon change. For Franz Pfeiffer of the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, and his colleagues report, in the April edition of Nature Physics, that they have manipulated standard X-ray imaging techniques to show many more details of the inner body.The trick needed to discern this fine detail, according to Dr Pfeiffer, is a simple one. The researchers took advantage not only of how tissues absorb X-rays but also of how much they slow their passage. This slowing can be seen as changes in the phase of the radiation that emerges—in other words of the relative positions of the peaks and troughs of the waves of which X-rays are composed.Subtle changes in phase are easily picked up, so doctors can detect even small variations in the composition of the tissue under investigation, such as might be caused by the early stages of breast cancer. Indeed, this trick—known as phase-contrast imaging—is already used routinely in optical microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. Until now, however, no one had thought to use it for medical X-radiography.To perform their trick, the researchers used a series of three devices called transmission gratings. They placed one between thesource of the X-rays and the body under examination, and two between the body and the X-ray detector that forms the image. The first grating gathers information on the phases of the X-rays passing through it. The second and third work together to produce the detailed phase-contrasted image. The approach generates two separate images—the classic X-ray image and the phase-contrasted image—which can then be combined to produce a high-resolution picture.The researchers tested their technique on a Cardinal tetra, a tiny iridescent fish commonly found in fish tanks and aquariums. The conventional X-ray image showed the bones and the gut of the fish, while the phase-contrasted image showed details of the fins, the ear and the eye.Dr Pfeiffer's technique would thus appear to offer a way to get much greater detail for the same amount of radiation exposure. Moreover, since it uses standard hospital equipment, it should be easy to introduce into medical practice. X-rays may no l onger be the stuff of Nobel prizes, but their usefulness may just have increased significantly.Here be dragonsWith luck, you may soon be able to buy a mythological petPAOLO FRIL, chairman and chief scientific officer of GeneDupe, based in San Melito, California, is a man with a dream. That dream is a dragon in every home.GeneDupe's business is biotech pets. Not for Dr Fril, though, the mundane cloning of dead moggies and pooches. He plans a range of entirely new animals—or, rather, of really quite old animals, with the twist that even when they did exist, it was only in the imagination.Making a mythical creature real is not easy. But GeneDupe's team of biologists and computer scientists reckon they are equal to the task. Their secret is a new field, which they call “virtual cell biology”.Biology and computing have a lot in common, since both are about processing information—in one case electronic; in the other, biochemical. Virtual cell biology aspires to make a software model of a cell that is accurate in every biochemical detail. That is possible because all animal cells use the same parts list—mitochondria for energy processing, the endoplasmic reticulum for making proteins, Golgi body for protein assembly, and so on.Armed with their virtual cell, GeneDupe's scientists can customise the result so that it belongs to a particular species, by loading it with a virtual copy of that animal's genome. Then, if the cell is also loaded with the right virtual molecules, it will behave like a fertilised egg, and start dividing and developing—first into an embryo, and ultimately into an adult.Because this “growth” is going on in a computer, it happens fast. Passing from egg to adult in one of GeneDupe's enormous Mythmaker computers takes less than a minute. And it is here that Charles Darwin gets a look in. With such a short generation time, GeneDupe's scientists can add a little evolution to their products.Each computer starts with a search image (dragon, unicorn, gryphon, etc), and the genome of the real animal most closely resembling it (a lizard for the dragon, a horse for the unicorn and, most taxingly, the spliced genomes of a lion and an eagle for the gryphon). The virtual genomes of these real animals are then tweaked by random electronic mutations. When they have matured, the virtual adults most closely resembling the targets are picked and cross-bred, while the others are culled.Using this rapid evolutionary process, GeneDupe's scientists have arrived at genomes for a range of mythological creatures—in a computer, at least. The next stage, on which they are just embarking, is to do it for real.This involves synthesising, with actual DNA, the genetic material that the computer models predict will produce the mythical creatures. The synthetic DNA is then inserted into a cell that has had its natural nucleus removed. The result, Dr Fril and his commercial backers hope, will be a real live dragon, unicorn or what have you.Tales of the unexpectedWhy a drug trial went so badly wrongIN ANY sort of test, not least a drugs trial, one should expect the unexpected. Even so, on March 13th, six volunteers taking part in a small clinical trial of a treatment known as TGN1412 got far more than they bargained for. All ended up seriously ill, with multiple organ failure, soon after being injected with the drug at a special testing unit at Northwick Park Hospital in London, run by a company called Parexel. One man remains ill in hospital.Small, preliminary trials of this sort are intended to find out whether a drug is toxic. Nevertheless, the mishap was so seri ous that Britain's Medic ines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), a government body, swiftly launched a full inquiry.On April 5th it announced its preliminary findings. These were that the trial was run correctly, doses of the drug were given as they were supposed to have been, and there was no contamination during manufacturing. In other words, it seems that despite extensive tests on animals and human-cell cultures, and despite the fact that the doses in the human trial were only a five-hundredth of those given to the animals, TGN1412 is toxic in people in a way that simply had not shown up.This is a difficult result for the drug business because it raises questions about the right way of testing medicines of this kind. TGN1412 is unusual in that it is an antibody. Most drugs are what are known as “small molecules”. Antibodies are big, powerful proteins that are the workhorses of the immune system. A mere 20 of them have been approved for human therapy, or are in latestage clinical trails, in America and Europe, but hundreds are in pre-clinical development, and will soon need to be tried out on people.Most antibody drugs are designed to work in one of three ways: by recruiting parts of the immune system to kill cancer cells; by delivering a small-molecule drug or a radioactive atom specifically to a cancer; or by blocking unwanted immune responses. In that sense, TGN1412 was unusual because it worked in a fourth way. It is what is called a “superagonistic” antibody, designed to increase the numbers of a type of immune cell known as regulatory T-cells.Reduced numbers, or impaired function, of regulatory T-cells has been implicated in a number of illnesses, such as type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. Boosting the pool of these antibodies seemed like a good treatment strategy. Unfortunately, that strategy fell disastrously to pieces and it will take a little longer to find out why.The result highlights concerns raised in a paper just published by the Academy of Medical Sciences, a group of experts based in London. It says there are special risks associated with novel antibody therapies. For example, their chemical specificity means that they might not bind to their targets in humans as they do in other species.Accidence and substanceTwo possible explanations for the bulk of realityTHE unknown pervades the universe. That which people can see, with the aid of various sorts of telescope, accounts for just 4% of the total mass. The rest, however, must exist. Without it, galaxies would not survive and the universe would not be gently expanding, as witnessed by astronomers. What exactly constitutes this dark matter and dark energy remains mysterious, but physicists have recently uncovered some more clues, about the former, at least.One possible explanation for dark matter is a group of subatomic particles called neutrinos. These objects are so difficult to catch that a screen made of lead a light-year thick would stop only half the neutrinos beamed at it from getting through. Yet neutrinos are thought to be the most abundant particles in the universe. Some ten thousand trillion trillion—most of them produced by nuclear reactions in the sun—reach Earth every second. All but a handful pass straight through the planet as if it wasn't there.According to the Standard Model, the most successful description of particle physics to date, neutrinos come in three varieties, called “flavours”. These are known as electron neutrinos, tau neutrinos and muon neutrinos. Again, according to the Standard Model, they are point-like, electrically neutral and massless. But in recent years, this view has been challenged, as physicists realised that neutrinos might have mass.The first strong evidence came in 1998, when researchers at an experiment called SuperKamiokande, based at Kamioka, in Japan, showed that muon neutrinos produced by cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere had gone missing by the time they should have reached an underground detector. SuperKamiokande's operators suspect that the missing muon neutrinos had changed flavour, becoming electron neutrinos or—more likely—tau neutrinos. Theory suggests that this process, called oscillation, can happen only if neutrinos have mass.Since then, there have been other reports of oscillation. Results from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada suggest that electron neutrinos produced by nuclear reactions in the sun change into either muon or tau neutrinos on their journey to Earth. Two other Japanese experiments, one conducted at Kamioka and one involving the KEK partic le-accelerator laboratory in Tsukuba, near Tokyo, also hint at oscillation.Last week, researchers working on the MINOS experiment at Fermilab, near Chicago, confirmed these results. Over the coming months and years, they hope to produce the most accurate measurements yet. The researchers created a beam of muon neutrinos by firing an intense stream of protons into a block of carbon. On the other side of the target sat a particle detector that monitored the number of muon neutrinos leaving the Fermilab site. The neutrinos then traveled 750km (450 miles) through the Earth to a detector in a former iron mine in Soudan, Minnesota.Myths and migrationDo immigrants really hurt American workers' wages?EVERY now and again America, a nation largely made up of immigrants and their descendants, is gripped by a furious political row over whether and how it should stem the flood of people wanting to enter the country. It is in the midst of just such a quarrel now. Congress is contemplating the erection of a wall along stretches of the Mexican border and a crackdown on illegal workers, as well as softer policies such as a guest-worker programme for illegal immigrants. Some of the arguments are plain silly. Immigration's defenders claim that foreigners come to do jobs that Americans won't—as if cities with few immigrants had no gardeners. Its opponents say that immigrants steal American jobs—succumbing to the fallacy that there are only a fixed number of jobs to go around.One common argument, though not silly, is often overstated: that immigration pushes down American workers' wages, especially among high-school dropouts. It isn't hard to see why this might be. Over the past 25 years American incomes have become less equally distributed, typical wages have grown surprisingly slowly for such a healthy economy and the real wages of the least skilled have actually fallen. It is plausible that immigration is at least partly to blame, especially because recent arrivals have disproportionately poor skills. In the 2000 census immigrants made up 13% of America's pool of workers, but 28% of those without a high-school education and over half of those with eight years' schooling or less.In fact, the relationship between immigration and wages is not clear-cut, even in theory. That is because wages depend on the supply of capital as well as labour. Alone, an influx of immigrants raises the supply of workers and hence reduces wages. But cheaper labour increases the potential return to employers of building new factories or opening new valet-parking companies. In so doing, they create extra demand for workers. Once capital has fully adjusted, the final impact on overall wages should be a wash, as long as the immigrants have not changed the productivity of the workforce as a whole.However, even if wages do not change on average, immigration can still shift the relative pay of workers of different types. A large inflow of low-skilled people could push down the relative wages of low-skilled natives, assuming that they compete for the same jobs. On the other hand, if the immigrants had complementary skills, natives would be relatively better off. To gauge the full effect of immigration on wages, therefore, you need to know how quickly capital adjusts and how far the newcomers are substitutes for local workers.Roaming holidayThe EU hopes to slash the price of cross-border mobile calls“TODAY it is only when using your mobile phone abroad that you realise there are still borders in Europe,” lamented Viviane Reding, the European commissioner responsible for telecoms and media regulation, as she announced plans to slash the cost of mobile roaming last month. It is a laudable aim: European consumers typically pay €1.25 ($1.50) per minute to call home from another European country, and €1 per minute to receive calls from home while abroad. With roaming margins above 90%, European mobile operators make profits of around €10 billion a year from the trade, the commission estimates.Ms Reding's plan, unveiled on March 28th and up for discussion until May 12th, is to impose a “home pricing” scheme. Even while roaming, callers would be charged whatever they would normally pay to use their phones in their home countries; charges for incoming calls while roaming would be abolished. That may sound good. But, as the industry is understandably at pains to point out, it could have some curious knock-on effects.In particular, consumers could sign up with operators in foreign countries to take advantage of lower prices. Everyone would take out subscriptions to the cheapest supplier and bring them back home, says John Tysoe of the Mobile World, a consultancy. “You'd end up with a complete muddle. An operator might have a network, bu t no customers, because they've all migrated.”Another problem with Ms Reding's plan, he says, is that operators would compensate for the loss of roaming fees— thought to account for around 3% of their revenues and 5% of profits—by raising prices elsewhere. This would have the perverse effect of lowering prices for international business travellers, a big chunk of roaming traffic, while raising prices for most consumers.The commission's proposals are “economically incoherent”, says Richard Feasey of Vodafo ne, which operates mobile networks in many European countries. Imposing price caps on roaming is legally questionable, he says, and Vodafone has, in any case, been steadily reducing its roaming charges. (European regulators prevented it from doing so for three years on antitrust grounds after its takeover of Mannesmann in 2000.) Orange, another multinational operator, says it is planning to make price cuts,too. “Of course, now everybody's got price cuts,” says Stefano Nicoletti of Ovum, a consultancy.But perhaps Ms Reding's unspoken plan is to use the threat of regulation as a way to prompt action. Operators are right that her proposals make no sense, but they are charging too much all the same. So expect them to lobby hard against the proposals over the next couple of years, while quietly cutting their prices—an outcome that would, of course, allow both sides to claim victory.Devices and their desiresEngineers and chemists get togetherTHERE used to be a world of difference between treating a patient with a device—such as a fake hip or a pacemaker—and using biology and biochemistry. Different ailments required wholly different treatments, often with little in common. But that is changing as medical advances—such as those being trumpeted at the biotechnology industry's annual gathering this week in Chicago—foster combinations of surgical implants and other hardware with support from medicines. Drug-releasing stents were one of the first fruits of this trend, which increasingly requires vastly different sorts of health-care firms to mesh their research efforts.That will be a challenge. While pharmaceutical and biotech firms are always in search of the next big thing, devicemakers prefer gradual progress. Instead of hanging out with breathless entrepreneurs near America's east and west coasts, where most drug and biotechnology firms are based, many of the device-makers huddle in midwestern cities such as Minneapolis, Indianapolis and Kalamazoo. And unlike Big Pharma, which uses marketing blitzes to tell ailing consumers about its new drugs, medical-device sales teams act more as instructors, showing doctors how to install their latest creations.Several companies, however, are now trying to bring these two business cultures together. Earlier this year, for example, Angiotech Pharmaceuticals, a Canadian firm, bought American Medical Instruments (AMI). Angiotech's managers reckon their company has devised a good way to apply drug coatings to all sorts of medical paraphernalia, from sutures and syringes to catheters, in order to reduce the shock to the body. AMI makes just the sorts of medical supplies to which Angiotech hopes to apply its techniques.One of America's biggest makers of medical devices, Medtronic, has been doing joint research with Genzyme, a biotechnology company that is also keen on broader approaches to health care. Genzyme says that it was looking for better ways to treat ailments, such as coronary and kidney disease, and realised that it needed to understand better how electro-mechanical devices and information technology work. But combining its efforts with those of Medtronic “on a cultural level is very hard”, the company says. Biotechnology firms are used to much more risky projects and far longer development cycles.Another difference is that device-makers know that if a problem emerges with their hardware, the engineers will tinker around and try to resolve the glitch. Biotech and pharmaceutical firms have no such option. If a difficulty emerges after years of developing and testing a new pill, as with Merck's Vioxx, there may be little they can do about it. “You can't futz with a molecule”, says Debbie Wang, a health-care industry analyst.Strangely, says Ms Wang, some of the most promising engineering outfits were once divisions of pharmaceutical andhealth-care companies, which got rid of them precisely because they did not appear to offer the rapid growth that managers saw in prescription drugs. Guidant, a maker of various cardiovascular devices, was spun off by Eli Lilly in 1994 and a decade later became the prize in a bidding war between Johnson & Johnson and Boston Scientific, which Boston won earlier this year.Pfizer sold Howmedica, which makes joint replacements and prosthetics, to Kalamazoo-based Stryker in 1998. Anotherjoint-replacement maker, Zimmer, was spun off from Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2001. Now both those companies are looking for ways to add “anti-interactive coatings”—ie, drugs—to their business. One of the most troublesome complications in joint replacement is infection.The big drug companies might be tempted to reacquire the firms that they let go. But, given the potential for cultural and strategic clashes, it may make more sense for a few big and broad medical-device makers, such as Medtronic, Boston Scientific and St Jude Medical, to continue consolidating their own industry while co-operating, along the lines of the Medtronic-Genzyme venture, with biotech and pharmaceutical firms as they see fit. There would still be irritation; but probably less risk of wholesale rejection.Eat less, live moreHow to live longer—maybeDIETING, according to an old joke, may not actually make you live longer, but it sure feels that way. Nevertheless, evidence has been accumulating since the 1930s that calorie restriction—reducing an animal's energy intake below its energy expenditure—extends lifespan and delays the onset of age-related diseases in rats, dogs, fish and monkeys. Such results have inspired thousands of people to put up with constant hunger in the hope of living longer, healthier lives. They have also led to a search for drugs that mimic the effects of calorie restriction without the pain of going on an actual diet.Amid the hype, it is easy to forget that no one has until now shown that calorie restriction works in humans. That omission, however, changed this month, with the publication of the initial results of the first systematic investigation into the matter. This study, known as CALERIE (Comprehensive Assessment of Long-term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy), was sponsored by America's National Institutes of Health. It took 48 men and women aged between 25 and 50 and assigned them randomly to either a control group or a calorie-restriction regime. Those in the second group were required to cut their calorie intake for six months to 75% of that needed to maintain their weight.The CALERIE study is a landmark in the history of the field, because its subjects were either of normal weight or only slightly overweight. Previous projects have used individuals who were clinically obese, thus confusing the unquestionable benefits to health of reducing obesity with the possible advantages of calorie restriction to the otherwise healthy.At a molecular level, CALERIE suggests these advantages are real. For example, those on restricted diets had lower insulin resistance (high resistance is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes) and lower levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (high levels are a risk factor for heart disease). They showed drops in body temperature and blood-insulin levels—both phenomena that have been seen in long-lived, calorie-restricted animals. They also suffered less oxidative damage to their DNA.Eric Ravussin, of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who is one of the study's authors, says that such results provide support for the theory that calorie restriction produces a metabolic adaptation over and above that which would be expected from weight loss alone. (He also points out that it will be a long time before such work reveals whether calorie restriction actually extends life.) Nevertheless, such metabolic adaptation could be the reason why calorie restriction is associated with longer lifespans in other animals—and that is certainly the hope of those who, for the past 15 years, have been searching for ways of triggering that metabolic adaptation by means other than semi-starvation.The search for a drug that will stave off old age is itself as old as the hills—as is the wishful thinking of the suckers who finance such efforts. Those who hope to find it by mimicking the effect of calorie restriction are not, however, complete snake-oil salesmen, for there is known to be a family of enzymes called sirtuins, which act both as sensors of nutrient availability and as regulators of metabolic rate. These might provide the necessary biochemical link between starving and living longer.Universal service?Proponents of “software as a service” say it will wipe out traditional softwareSOMETHING momentous is happening in the software business. Bill Gates of Mi crosoft calls it “the next sea change”. Analysts call it a “tectonic shift” in the industry. Trade publications hail it as “the next big thing”. It is software-as-a-service (SaaS)—the delivery of software as an internet-based service via a web browser, rather than as a product that must be purchased, installed and maintained. The appeal is obvious: SaaS is quicker, easier and cheaper to deploy than traditional software, which means technology budgets can be focused on providing competitive advantage, rather than maintenance.This has prompted an outbreak of iconoclasm. “Traditional software is dead,” says Jason Maynard, an analyst at Credit Suisse. Just as most firms do not own generators, but buy electricity from the grid, so in future they will buy software on the hoof, he says. “It's the end of software as we know it. All software is becoming a service,” declares Marc Benioff of , thebest-known proponent of the idea. But while SaaS is growing fast, it still represents only a tiny fraction of the overall software industry—a mere $3.35 billion last year, estimates Mr Maynard. Most observers expect it to be worth around $12 billion by 2010—but even that is equal only to Microsoft's quarterly sales today. There is no denying that SaaS is coming. But there is much debate, even among its advocates, about how quickly it will grow, and how widely it will be adopted.At the moment, small and medium-sized businesses are the most enthusiastic adopters of SaaS, since it is cheaper and simpler than maintaining rooms of server computers and employing staff to keep them running. Unlike the market for desktop software,。

Lovesick Japan: Sex, Marriage, Romance, Law. By Mark West. Cornell University Press; 259 pages; $29.95 and £19.95.ON FEBRUARY 19th 2006 Kimiko and her married lover Tetsuo checked into an Osaka love-hotel, swallowed sedatives and slit their wrists. When they awoke at midnight and realised their suicides had failed, Tetsuo strangled Kimiko at her request, then tried to hang himself and cut his wrists again. Unsuccessful, he called the police. At the trial, where an American court would consider questions of intent, the Japanese court based its ruling on whether Kimiko was in love. If she was, the court reasoned, she may have consented to her murder and Tetsuo would receive a lighter sentence.Many facets of Japan seem mysterious to outsiders. Courts are sometimes obliged to seek answers to questions about love that may well be unanswerable. Yet in cases where love might indeed have a bearing, such as divorce, judges usually ignore the emotion entirely. Teasing out the mysteries of Japanese society by way of its statutes is the speciality of Mark West, a professor at Michigan Law School.In “Lovesick Japan” he trolls through 2,700 court opinions to paint a picture of a country that treats marriage more as an economic contract than an emotional bond. As seen by the judiciary, a little adultery should not trump marriage as an institution. “Japanese courts have no problem waltzing into bedrooms and brothels in ways that are not essential to deciding the case at hand,” he writes. “What they find there rarely seems to please them.”According to surveys, there seems to be less sex going on in Japan than in any other big country. A Health Ministry study in 2006 reported that as many as one-third of all married couples under the age of 50 had sex, or even kissed or held hands, less than once a month. Indeed, kissing itself was long considered unhygienic. It was encouraged during the American occupation in the belief that such Western ways might promote democracy and erode the patriarchal household system.Still, the Japanese are not shy about their fetishes and the law takes a permissive attitude to commercial sex. It is not illegal to pay for sex; a 1997 study showed that more than half of all men over 25 had done just that (and that for many of them it had been their first sexual experience). Though statutes prohibit everything from pimping to providing the venue, prostitution itself carries no penalty. And prostitution is defined exclusively as intercourse: other acts don’t count. As a result, “soaplands” (bathhouses where men are serviced by women) and “delivery health” (women dispatched to homes or hotels) are legitimate businesses.Mr West presents a judiciary that is sometimes out of step with the “sense of society” on which it regularly bases its rulings. In divo rce proceedings judges make it a virtue for wives to forgive adultery or overlook domestic violence.Judges may also go far beyond their brief to comment on social mores, In one instance, in 1991, a judge decided that modern appliances are partly responsible for failed marriages because they “give women time to contemplate”. In that particular case the judge rejected a wife’s request for divorce after years of physical abuse, living separately and even a suicide attempt because her husband did not cheat or gamble, and looked so forlorn in court. “They should search together for the bluebird they were unable to find before,” the judge ruled. The reference to a “bluebird” is as jarring in Japanese as it is in English.Judges use a multi-part test, that does not include love, to approve a contested divorce. Yet love plays a part in cases where it is perhaps less relevant. For instance, sexual relations with a minor is sometimes excused if the court rules there is love. Judges set out to decide whether the defen dant is “earnest”, which means either in love or contemplating marriage.In the case of rape, Japanese courts consider factors that American and European ones would not. Being drunk is a valid defence. One 1992 ruling suspended the sentences of two men ou t of compassion for what they “must have faced when the victim told them no”. A 1994 trial led to an acquittal in part because the victim’s “chastity is questionable”: she had slept with her boyfriend after a second date.An Osaka District Court ruling in 2008 acknowledged a victim’s lack of consent, but felt her resistance was insufficient. The 24-year-old man was simply told by the court to “reflect deeply” on his “inappropriate” act of having sex in a parked car on a public road with a 14-year-old he ha d met the day before. Japan’s penal code does not apply statutory rape to a person over 13.A problem with Mr West’s book is that he tends to generalise on contemporary life from what are clearly extreme cases, or from rulings that are 30 or so years old. He might, with advantage, have lifted his head from the law books and carried out more of the on-the-ground research that made the book he wrote in 2005, “Law in Everyday Japan: Sex, Sumo, Suicide and Statutes”, so good. In that book he examined Japanese society through the lens of law. Here, he takes the law and tries to make larger points about Japan. It is not quite as satisfying, nor is it such fun.“Lovesick Japan” reveals more about the judiciary than it does about society. But that is still a tale w orth telling. As for the late Kimiko and Tetsuo? “The court found love,” reports Mr West. Tetsuo was guilty only of aiding suicide and sentenced to a mere six and a half years in prison.。

TEXT 41The bane of Italy祸起意大利（陈继龙编译）Jun 29th 2006From The Economist print editionALEXANDER STILLE'S new book on Silvio Berlusconi, the flamboyant[1] former I talian prime minister, is neither a b________① nor a work of investigative journalism. Its real value is that it represents the firstattempt,in English at least, to recount in a readable fashion the story, not of Mr Berlusconi himself, but ofBerlusconi-ism.（1）That gives it a wide appeal, for, as its author argues persuasively, Berlusconi-ism is the extrapolation[2] to grotesque[3] extremes of a phenomenon that has gradually, and all too imperceptibly, become widespread.亚历山大·斯蒂莱的新作写的是个性张扬的意大利前任总理西尔维奥·贝鲁斯科尼，但它并非是一本传记，也不是新闻调查作品。

其真正的价值在于，它首次尝试以一种可读性较强的风格，记述了“贝鲁斯科尼主义”而不是贝鲁斯科尼的生平。

这也是本书独具魅力之所在，因为诚如作者很有说服力地论证的那样，“贝鲁斯科尼主义”是对某种现象怪诞至极时的推论，这种现象日趋普遍而所有人却都浑然不觉。

一、判断题1、国际收支平衡表在账面上总是平衡的。

（）正确答案：√2、经常账户顺差表示该账户下，贷方余额减去借方余额大于零。

（）正确答案：√3、中国国际收支双顺差的意思是“经常账户顺差，资本与金融账户顺差”。

（）正确答案：√4、中国是货物的净出口国，服务的净出口国。

（）正确答案：×5、错误与遗漏账户是一个交易账户。

（）正确答案：×6、顺差对一国是好的，多多益善。

（）正确答案：×7、中国出口外汇储备增加了，表明中国国际清偿能力增加了。

（）正确答案：√8、顺差往往带来该国货币带来升值的压力。

（）正确答案：√9、中国国际收支顺差最大的贡献者是贸易顺差。

（）正确答案：√10、20世纪90年代以来外汇占款是中国央行扩张基础货币的主要渠道。

（）正确答案：×11、绝对购买力平价的基础是一价定律。

（）正确答案：√12、《经济学人》（The Economist）期刊多年来使用巨无霸指数来计算绝对购买力平价。

（）正确答案：√13、根据《经济学人》（The Economist）期刊计算的汇率和市场汇率一致。

（）正确答案：×14、相对购买力平价考虑的是某个时间段的汇率决定。

（）正确答案：√15、通货膨胀会影响汇率水平。

（）正确答案：√16、根据购买力平价，高通胀国家的货币会贬值，低通胀国家的货币会升值。

（）正确答案：√17、美联储的数量宽松型货币政策可能会导致美元贬值。

（）正确答案：√18、根据抛补套利平价，利率高的货币在远期外汇市场会升水。

（）正确答案：×19、由于资本管制等因素，汇率往往偏离利率平价。

（）正确答案：√20、偏好风险的投资者，对未来的即期汇率有确定的预期。

（）正确答案：√21、开放宏观经济下，一国外部平衡目标就是国际收支平衡。

（）正确答案：√22、开放宏观经济环境下，内外平衡目标有时候是有矛盾的。

（）正确答案：√23、金本位制度下，国际收支不能够自动调节。

ambitions but their business cul t ure hasdeep provincial roots. They look back as much as forward. "We have existed since 1825 and have been doing the same thing since then," says Dieter Brand, chairman of the Sparkasse, or savings bank, in Bielefeld, the region's biggest town. In some sensesthe same is true of his corporate custom ers. Germany may have reformed and rearticulated its model in recent years. Butthe underlying skeleton is ancient, and perhaps inimitable.Two decades ago, the country seemed distinctly arthritic. The euphoria of unification in 1990 was followed by the sharpest recession since t he second world war.Some 50o,ooo manufacturing jobs were lost. Business was menaced by an overvalued n -mark, nimble Asian competitorsand unification's huge costs. The economy had become rigid and uncompetitive, moaned en t repreneurs. The then-president,Roman Herzog, cap t ured the zeitgeistin 1997 when he spoke of "the loss of economic dynamism, the torpor of society, an unbelievable mental depression". Reformers clamoured for elements of the Germanmodel, like vocational training and centralised wage bargaining, to be scrapped.Sha pi ng upInstead it was made more limber. Business outsourced some production to eastern Europe; fear of that process extracted concessions from German workers, who offeredflexibility on wages and work hoursin exchange for greater job security. In the subsequent decade manufacturing's shareof GDP rose even as it was falling elsewhere (see chart 3 on next page).In the early 2000s, with growth still inlow gear and unemployment in doubledigits, the then-chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, a Social Democrat, started another round of gruelling physiotherapy.His labour-market reforms reduced unemploymentbenefits and liberalised temporarywork. Since she became chancellor in2005 Mrs Merkel of the Christian Democrats has raised the pension age from 65 to67 and amended the constitution to require state and federal governments to cuttheir structural budget deficits to more or less zero (the template for what is now a Europe-wide agreement).Benefits thought to be sacrosanct were cut. Income inequality rose. But so did employment.Core workers in industrialfirms- the muscle behind Germany's manufacturing prowess- were not affected directly. But the rise in low-paid, insecure jobs has held down the cost of services, making it easier for factory workersto accept modest pay rises, points out Anke Hassel of the Hertie School of Governancein Berlin.The original assembly of the Germanmodel also dates to a recessionary crisis following hard on the heels of a unifica-I On the rebound 11GOP per pe r son,% change on p r evio u s yea r- Germany B rita i n- United States - E u r o a rea42+24----~----~----~----~- 6 1997 99 2001 03 05 07 09 * 1So u rc e: IM F • e sti ma te !for ecasttion: a 23-year-long slump starting in 1873,two years after Bismarck finally succeededin pulling Germany together into a single state. This Griindehrise and its prolongedaftermath forged new ideas about how capital, labour and the state should relateto one another.An 1884law created t he dual-board systemof corporate governance in its currentform, with a managing Vorstand answerableto a separate supervisory board.Among the supervisors were bankers,who provided "patient capital", and scientists, whose expertise was valued as highly.The vocational training system, set up during the 1880s, provided new producers of chemicals and machinery with skilled andloyal workers. Bismarck established the welfare state in part to cater to their needs.The way the health insurance systemworked required capital and labour to cooperate, paving the way for works councilsand, almost a century later, for mandatory representation for the workers on the supervisory boards of large companies.The "co-ordinated market economy"has withstood dictatorship, wars, revolutions and globalisation. It prizes trust, relyingon t he principle that nobody will"make full use of his freedom" by grabbing everything he can, says Wemer Abelshauser, an economic historian at the Universityof Bielefeld. Its elements are "soI Off balanceCur r e n t-accoun t ba l a n ces,% of GOP- Germany - E uro area - U ni t ed StatesBrita i n France - I ta l y8642~~~~~4-..--.-..-~~~~----~- 61997 99 2001 03 05 07 09 121So u r c e: IMF • Esti ma t e !Fore c a stThe Economist April 14th 2012tightly meshed", he has written, "that it would be difficult to replace any one of them wi t h an alien component."The trust and co-ordination may be national properties, but their roots are typicallyquite local. Before Bismarck, Germany's provinces, principalities andpalatinates often had rulers who werekeen to establish local industries. In 1678 Brandenburg's Great Elector gave Bielefeld the privilege of certifying the quality of lo cal linen, cementing its position as a cen t refor the textile trade. Centuries later Beckhoff's first customers made machines forthe furniture industry that had developedout of the crate-making trade that hadgrown with the export of textiles.Dozens of other regions can tell similar stories, and these concentrations have become part of the country's contemporary success. On a list of 100 clusters picked bythe European Cluster Observatory fortheir size, level of specialisation and loca tion in "innovative regions", Germany occupies 30 places.Germany experimented with American-style standardised production duringand after the second world war, which was one reason why it imported unskilledguest workers from Turkey and elsewhere. The Siren across the Atlantic called again in the 1990s and 2000s, urging Germany to deregulate, embrace services and maximise "shareholder value". When that callwas silenced by the financial crisis, "Germany had its consensus model to go backto," says Gustav Horn of the union-linked Macroeconomic Policy Institute.Small towns in GermanyHans Beckhoff, boss of the automation company that bears his name, does notcome off as a throwback. His silver-greyhair is modishly long, his collar unbuttoned.But some of his habits seem distinctlyold-fashioned. Take his approach todebt: he's against it. Investment in the companyis funded by him and his three siblings,the only shareholders. It is the samewith nearby Miele, a 113-year-old maker of kitchen equipment and white goods, with annual sales of €3 billion. This is not themost efficient way to run a company. With more leverage Mittelstand firms couldboost their pre-tax profit by several points, notes Arm in Schmiedeberg of Bain, a consultancy.He thinks they are wise not to.The point is not to maximise short-termprofit, says Markus Miele, a managing directora t his firm, bu t to aim at "where wewant to be when we hand over to the next generation." Mr Beckhoff says he fends off monthly offers to buy his company. Lack of financial ambition goes along with the observance of unwri tt en sumptuary laws."Families behind the Mittelstand live in an acceptable, modest and healthy way," saysMr Beckhoff.Maybe that is because they lean so ~~32 Briefing Germany's economic model~ heavily on the skilled workers the countryis so good at producing. Around half of German high-school students go on todual training in one of 344 trades, from tanner to dental technician. Many of t hecourses are set by unions and employers' federations. State and local governments provide the schools where apprentices get their theory. Chambers of commerce and industry run the exams. When foreignersask why youth unemployment is so low (just 8.2% compared wi t h Spain's so.s%), older Germans tou t the dual system.Young Germans are not so convinced; itis the first choice of just a fifth of highschool students, says Swen Binner of theBielefeld chamber of commerce. And thenumber of schoolleavers in owL is dropping by 2% a year while demand for skills is rising. Business is adapting by blurring the previously sharp distinction between vocationaland university training. Beckhoffnow offers "academic apprenticeships", which combine hands-on experience wi t h study at a technical university.The relationship between conscientious proprietors and diligent craftsmen isnot without conflict, but it is set in a governanceframework that contains disagree ments without stifling them, and can deliver flexibility. In the metal and electrical engineering sector, the heart of manufac turing, labour contracts still tend to be settledon an industry-wide basis (outsourcing trouble, as some bosses see it).Knowing what's kneadedThe entrepreneurs of owL are confidentthat global trends will continue to go their way. 5 billion people can reasonably aspire to join the 1 billion who are already well off, says Mr Beckhoff. It will take "a lot of engineering" to pull that off without environmentalruin and s t rife over resources,and t hat will provide ever more opportunities for manufacturers.As the aerospace industry turns to new materials like titanium and car makers shrink engines to boost efficiency, they provide machine-tool makers with new markets. And old markets can be refined as they grow. WP Kemper, a maker of baking equipment near Bielefeld, expects demand for dough to double over the next decade, as consumers in developing countries broaden their diets. The new generationof bakers will be unfamiliar with the mysteries of European bread, so Kemper is working on an "intelligent kneader" thatknows when dough is ready.Many Mittelstand firms are oligopolists, argues Mr Schmiedeberg, occupying niches so narrow that they attract few rivals. Increasingly, the niches are being defended with services, in t his context notthe term of derision it often is in manufacturingcircles. Beckhoff builds its own salesand maintenance networks, relying littleon dealers-unlike some of its non-Ger-I Making moreManufacturing,% o f G DP- Germany - I ta ly - E u roa r ea- United States Britain F r ance24222018 - 1614• ....... ~ 12 •10+1997 99 2001 03 05 07 09 10So u rc es: US B u r e au o f Econo mic Ana lys i s; Eu rost a tman competitors.The next stage is "hybrid value-added",in which the product is an outcome thatthe customer wants rather than the goodthat produces it. Wolf Heiztechnik of Bavaria is developing a contract under whichit sells t emperature control ra t her than heating equipment. "Every Chinese firmcan do the industrial part, not the whole hybrid," says Karl Lichtblau of IW Consult, a consultancy. Counting industry-related services, he reckons, manufacturing'sshare of GDP is more like 30% than 20%.In places like Bielefeld the future lookslike an extension of the past. Not everything changes at once, and institutions arethere to help out. When the machinebuilding department at Bielefeld's Universityof Applied Sciences looked in dangerof closing, industry drummed up interest among students to keep it open. IT's owL,a new initiative by machine builders, carpart suppliers and electronics companies, enlists universities to add intelligence to regionalproducts, like Kemper's smartkneader. "We are successful because we have companies behind us and companies ahead of us," says Mr Beckhoff. His advice to politicians: don't break the chain. But is the success of which he is justly proud enough? And is it something other countries can learn from?The platform for Germany's successI Paying lessUni t la b our c osts, t o tal economy, 2005=100B ri tain - Euro are a*- Uni t ed S t a t es - Germany12011010090807060,, , , , , , ,, , ,,, ,, , , ,,, , ..,1990 95 2000 05 10So u r c e: O E CD *Esti m ate 1990·94The Economist April 14th 2012looks precariously narrow. Vehicles, machines,electronic devices and chemicals account for more than half of Germany's exports, and exports provided nearly all Germany's growth from 2001 to 2007. Op timiststhink Germany can keep its shareof world trade, which grows twice as fast as global output, and thus stay ahead. Butthis is a big bet on a thin slice of the economy. Employment in manufacturingproper is less than a fifth of the total. In unglamorous,non-export oriented servicesGermany is in a much sorrier state. Stunted services depress incomes and investment. The OECD predicts that, as the population ages, potential growth will drop,falling below 1% by 2020. "The underlying issue is raising productivity in services and increasing wages in line with that," saysMr Tilford of the CER.Germany could do a lot more to perk up domestic demand. Deregulation of professionalservices would boost produc t ivityand inves t ment. Barriers to women working, including incentive-killing tax andbenefit regimes and a shortage of creches, should be removed. And Mr Tilford finds it "astonishing" that a country with a current-account surplus as big as Germany'sinsists on balancing its budget. Demographic decline could initially bea blessing, shifting power to workers as the workforce shrinks, with the subsequent increase in labour costs boosting domestic demand (see chart 4). Verdi, the services union, extracted a 6.3% pay rise from federal and municipal governments last month.In the engineering sector, where talks are under way, bosses are encountering amore assertive union. Domestic demand is expected to provide all this year's growth, partly because Germany's European trading partners are in such bad shape.Many of them would profit from becoming more like Germany in terms ofbuilding business success, but there are limits. Any leader with backing and boldness can imitate some of what Germanydid when its joints were stiffened, like raising the pension age (which France has onlyjust started on) or cutting social-security contributions, as Mr Sarkozy talks of do ing. Southern Europe's crash programmeof structural reform is partly inspired by Germany. The dual system may be exportable, though not overnight.But it is another matter to excel in highend capital goods or to assign to enterprise, unions and t he state roles that Germanyhas been practising, with disastrous interruptions,for more than a century. Duringthe crisis Italy introduced a short-time working scheme like Germany's, but the results were disappointing: Italian firmsand their workers could not mimic Germany's ordered flexibility. Germany canoffer lessons in how to get back into shape; but the essence of its model is rooted too deeply to be copied with ease. •。