Методические указания: профессиональный английский язык для студентов 5 и 6 курсов заочного факультета специальность 060800: Экономика и управление (стр. 6 из 14)

III. MICROECONOMICS OF TRANSPORTATION

1. Translate the following expressions into Russian.

Provision, capacity, load, to tend, to obscure, perspective, public, private, boundary, to include, to exclude, accounting, analysis, to supply, size, range, to provide, to carry out, safety, defense, mix, entities, profit, to support, profitable, subsidization schemes, hazardous materials, to detect, controversial, matter, to limit, length, weight, axle spacings, to own, to restrict, carrier, to capture, treaty, fare, liner, rate, to charge, route, value, shipper, carriage, an aggregate, cost.

2. Read the text with a dictionary.

1. Transport can be considered in the economic terms of'supply' or provision
of service, and 'demand' or requirement for service. In engineering terms these
are 'capacity' and 'load'. Demand is often referred to as 'need' which the 'elasticity'
of price and time associated with a traffic load.

2. Transportation can be analyzed from either a 'public' or society
perspective, or from a 'private' localized set of rules. Each transport system and
activity exists from several perspectives. Generally the perspective determines
where the between what should be included and what can be excluded from an
accounting or analysis. Transportation is supplied by individual firms of all sizes
and by government agencies. The range of government involvement differs by

type, or mode, of transportation and the geographic or political areas of jurisdiction. Governments are involved in providing transportation because it is necessary for economic development, for carrying out certain other functions of government (such as public safety or making it easier for individuals to reach schools or hospitals), and for national defense. So, in the supply of transportation services, a mix of public and private entities is usual. Private firms are responsive in situations where there is a profit to be made. If the market will not support profitable operators, a variety of government subsidization schemes are used.

3. In addition to economic regulation, all levels of government regulate transportation safety and movements of hazardous materials. Testing transportation operators to detect possible drug use is a controversial matter. States also limit the lengths, weights, and axle spacings of heavy trucks.

4. Economic regulation is handled differently in various other countries. A common pattern is for the government to own the railroads and airlines and to restrict other carriers if they appear to be capturing traffic from the government operations. International airline operations and services are regulated by strict treaties between the nations exchanging airline service. Actual fares are established by the International Air Transport Association (I ATA), a cartel (or organization) of all the world's air carriers. Cartels known as conferences also regulate the by ocean liners that carry cargo on a regular basis. Each conference is made up of member lines that serve certain routes, say, between U.S. gulf ports and ports along the Baltic.

3. Answer the questions:

1. How can transport be considered?

2. What does the perspective determine?

3. How is transportation supplied?

4. Why are governments involved in providing transportation?

5. When are private firms responsive?

6. What is a cartel?

7. What do they do?

4. Read the text and A) think of the suitable heading, B) make up an annotation.

Demand for freight transportation is generally a function of demand for a product. A simple definition of demand for freight transportation is that it reflects the difference between a commodity's value in two different markets. Freight is time-sensitive. Fresh seafood is perishable; newspapers must be delivered promptly.

Shippers have money invested in inventory and often want to use faster modes of transportation to reduce the amount of time they must wait for payment

For some goods, the cost of transportation is nearly the same as the cost of the product, and it thus influences demand for both the product and its carnage. Steel-mill slag (a by-product of the steel-making process) has almost no market value and sometimes steel mills must pay to have it carried away. It can be used as an aggregate in concrete but competes with other materials, such as sand, which are very low in cost. Many recycled products also have almost no market value, and transportation costs become the major factor viewed by those who may want to buy the recycled products for some subsequent use.

ЧАСТЬ 6 ТЕКСТЫ ДЛЯ ЧТЕНИЯ И ПЕРЕВОДА

Economics

No one has ever succeeded in neatly defining the scope of economics. Economists used to say, with Alfred Marshall, the great English economist, that economics is "a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing"— ignoring the fact that sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists frequently study exactly the same phenomena. Another English economist, Lionel Robbins, has more recently defined economics as "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between (given) ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." This definition — that economics is the science of economizing — captures one of the striking characteristics of the economist's way of thinking but leaves out the macroeconomic approach to the subject, which is concerned with the economy as a whole.

Difficult as it may be to define economics, it is not difficult to indicate the sort of questions that economists are concerned with. Among other things, they seek to analyze the forces determining prices — not only the prices of goods and services but the prices of the resources used to produce them. This means discovering what it is that governs the way in which men, machines, and land are combined in production and that determines how buyers and sellers are brought together in a functioning market. Prices of various things must be interrelated; how does such a "price system" or "market mechanism" hang together, and what are the conditions necessary for its survival?

These are questions in what is called "microeconomics," the part of economics that deals with the behaviour of such individuals as consumers, business firms, traders, and farmers. The other major branch of economics is "macroeconomics," in which the focus of attention is on aggregates: the level of income in the whole economy, the volume of total employment, the flow of total investment, and so forth. Here the economist is concerned with the forces determining the income of a nation or the level of total investment; he seeks to learn why full employment is so rarely attained and what public policies should be followed to achieve higher employment or more stability.

But these still do not exhaust the range of problems that economists consider. There is also the important field of "development economics," which examines the attitudes and institutions supporting economic activity as well as the process of development itself. The economist is concerned with the factors responsible for

self-sustaining economic growth and with the extent to which these factors can be manipulated by public policy.

Cutting across these three major divisions in economics are the specialized fields of public finance, money and banking, international trade, labour economics, agricultural economics, industrial organization, and others. Economists may be asked to assess the effects of governmental measures such as taxes, minimum-wage laws, rent controls, tariffs, changes in interest rates, changes in the government budget, and so on.

Economics

It is social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth.

The major divisions of economics include microeconomics, which deals with the behaviour of individual consumers, companies, traders, and farmers; and macroeconomics, which focuses on aggregates such as the level of income in an economy, the volume of total employment, and the flow of investment. Another branch, development economics, investigates the history and changes of economic activity and organization over a period of time, as well as their relation to other activities and institutions. Within these three major divisions there are specialized areas of study that attempt to answer questions on a broad spectrum of human economic activity, including public finance, money supply and banking, international trade, labour, industrial organization, and agriculture. The areas of investigation in economics overlap with other social sciences, particularly political science, but economics is primarily concerned with relations between buyer and seller.

Construction of a system

David Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) was, in one sense, simply a critical commentary on the Wealth of Nations; in another sense, it gave an entirely new twist to the developing science of political economy. Ricardo invented the concept of the "economic model," a tightly knit logical apparatus consisting of a few strategic variables, an apparatus that was capable of yielding, after a bit of manipulation, results of enormous practical import. At the heart of the Ricardian system is the notion that economic growth must sooner or later be arrested, owing to the rising cost of growing food on a limited land area. An essential ingredient of this argument is the Malthusian principle — enunciated in Thomas Malthus' Essay on Population (1798)—that population tends to increase up to the limits set by the existing supply of food, thus holding down wages. As the

labour force increases, extra food to feed the extra mouths can be produced only by extending cultivation to less fertile soil or by applying capital and labour to land already under cultivation (with diminishing results because of the so-called law of diminishing returns). Although wages are held down, profits do not rise proportionately because tenant farmers outbid each other for superior land. The chief beneficiaries of economic progress, therefore, are the landowners.

Since the root of the trouble, according to Ricardo, is the declining yield of wheat per unit of land, one obvious solution is to import cheap wheat from other countries. Eager to show that Britain would benefit from specializing in manufactured goods and exporting them in return for food, Ricardo hit upon the "law of comparative costs" as proof. He assumed that, within countries, labour and capital are free to move in search of the highest returns; between countries, however, they are not. In these circumstances, Ricardo showed, the benefits of trade are determined by a comparison of costs within each country, rather than by a comparison of costs between countries. It pays a country to specialize in the production of those goods that it can produce relatively more efficiently and to import everything else; although India may be able to produce everything more efficiently than England, India is nevertheless well advised to concentrate its resources on textiles, in which its efficiency is relatively greater, and to import British capital goods. The beauty of the argument is that if all countries take full advantage of the territorial division of labour, total world output is certain to be larger than it will be if some or all countries try to become self-sufficient. Ricardo's law became the fountainhead of 19th-century free-trade doctrine, which would have been enough, if he had said nothing else, to give him a place in the economists' pantheon.

The influence of Ricardo's treatise was felt almost as soon as it was published, and for over half a century the Ricardian system dominated economic thinking in Britain. In 1848 John Stuart Mill's restatement of Ricardo's thought in his Principles of Political Economy brought it new authority. After 1870, however, most economists turned their backs on the range of problems that had concerned Ricardo and began to re-examine the foundations of the theory of value; that is, they became interested in the theory of why goods exchange at particular prices, so that for a while they devoted almost all of their efforts to the problem of resource allocation under conditions of perfect competition.

Marxism

A few words must first be said, however, about the last of the classical economists, Karl Marx. The first volume of Das Kapital appeared in 1867; the second and third after his death, in 1885 and 1894. For a generation, therefore, the competitive market theorists jostled with the followers of Marx. By 1900 the

intellectual battle was over, and thereafter professional economists largely lost interest in Marx. Despite the Russian Revolution, despite what amounts to official endorsement of Marxism in one-third of the world, and despite the lingering influence of Marx's ideas, Marxian economics has been moribund ever since Marx's death in 1883. If Marx may be called 'the last of the classical economists," it is because to a large extent he found his economics not in the real world but in the teachings of Smith and Ricardo. They had espoused a "labour theory of value," which holds that products exchange roughly in proportion to the labour costs incurred in producing them. Marx worked out all the logical implications of this theory and added to it 'the theory of surplus value," which rests on the axiom that human labour alone creates all value and hence constitutes the sole source of profits. It is an axiom in the sense that it cannot be established in terms of the theory itself: it must be imported from without. To say that an economist is a Marxian economist is in effect to say that he shares the value judgment that it is socially undesirable for some people in the community to derive their income merely from the ownership of property. Since few professional economists in the 19th century accepted this ethical postulate and most were indeed inclined to find some social justification for the existence of private property and the income derived from it, Marxian economics fell on deaf ears. The Marxian system, moreover, culminated in three great generalizations: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the growing impoverishment of the working class, and the increasing severity of business cycles, of which the first is the linchpin of all the others. Marx's exposition of the "law of the declining rate of profit" is invalid; with it all of Marx's other predictions fall to the ground. In addition, Marxian economics had little to say on some of the practical problems that are the bread and butter of economists in any society. This is enough to suggest why Marxian economics failed to make many converts among academic economists. Marxists will reply that the reason is simply that academic economists have always been "lackeys of the capitalist class." Perhaps so, but the fact remains that Marx has had virtually no effect on modern economic thought.

The marginalists

The marginal revolution was essentially the work of three men: Stanley Jevons, an Englishman; Carl Menger, an Austrian; and Leon Walras, a Frenchman. Their contribution was the replacement of the labour theory of value by the marginal utility theory of value; their explanation of prices began with the behaviour of consumers in choosing among increments of goods and services (see utility and value). The idea of emphasizing the marginal or last unit proved in the long run to be more significant than the introduction of utility. It was the consistent application

of marginalism that marks the true dividing line between classical theory and modern economics. The classical political economists saw the economic problem as that of predicting the effects of changes in the quantity of capital and labour on the rate of growth of national output. The marginal approach, however, focussed on the conditions under which these factors tend to be allocated with optimal results among competing uses — optimal in the sense of maximizing consumers' satisfactions.