★征战AW，不忘阅读★Times or Economist系列精读★

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[size=0.8em]Reserve currencies
Cross my palm with euros? [size=0.7em]Nov 11th 2009
From Economist.com
The dollar’s days as the world’s reserve currency are far from over

[size=0.74em]Shutterstock

[size=0.8em]WORRIES about the dollar’s dominance of the global monetary system are not new. But debate about replacing the beleaguered dollar, whose trade-weighted value has dropped by 11.5% since its peak in March 2009, has resurfaced in the wake of a global financial and economic crisis that began in America. China and Russia, which have huge reserves that are mainly dollar denominated, have talked about shifting away from the greenback. India changed the composition of its reserves by buying 200 tonnes of gold from the IMF.

[size=0.8em]None of this threatens the dominance of the dollar yet, particularly as a dramatic shift out of the currency would be damaging to the countries (such as China) that hold a huge amount of dollar-denominated assets. But a new paper by economists at the IMF, released on Wednesday November 11th, acknowledges that the global crisis has reignited the debate about anchoring the world’s monetary system on one country’s currency.

[size=0.8em]Some say that America’s role as the principal issuer of the global reserve currency gives it an unfair advantage. America has a unique ability to borrow from foreigners in its own currency, and wins when the dollar depreciates, since its assets are mainly in foreign currency and its liabilities in dollars. By one estimate America enjoyed a net capital gain of around $1 trillion from the gradual depreciation of the dollar in the years before the crisis.

[size=0.8em]In a sense the world is hostage to America’s ability to maintain the value of the dollar. But as the IMF points out, the currency’s primacy arises at least partly because China and other emerging countries have chosen to accumulate dollar reserves. The depth of America’s financial markets and the country’s open capital account have made the dollar attractive. So some of the advantage has been earned.

[size=0.8em]But large and persistent surpluses in countries like China mean continued demand for American assets, reducing the need for fiscal adjustment by either country. This, in turn, has contributed to the build-up of the macroeconomic imbalances that many blame for the financial crisis.

[size=0.8em]Dealing with these imbalances could begin by finding ways to reduce reserve accumulation in emerging countries. The IMF reckons that about two-thirds of current reserves (about $4 trillion-$4.5 trillion) are held by countries as insurance against shocks, including sudden reversals of capital flows, banking crises and so on. In theory, groups of countries could pool reserves, so that a smaller amount would suffice than if countries each maintain their own buffers. Other alternatives include precautionary lines of credit(信用额度), such as the American Federal Reserve’s with the central banks of Brazil and Mexico, or the IMF’s flexible credit line.

[size=0.8em]But what are the alternatives to relying on the dollar? One possibility is a system with several competing reserve currencies. Over time, the euro and China’s yuan (if it became convertible) could emerge as competitors. This would require a great deal of policy co-ordination among issuing countries. But by having several reserve currencies the “privilege” that America now enjoys would be available more widely, providing an incentive to compete to attract users to different currencies.

[size=0.8em]Another alternative is a greater reliance on SDRs, the IMF’s quasi-currency, which operates as a claim on a basket of currencies: the dollar, euro, sterling and yen. Because the SDR’s value depends on several currencies, it shares many of the benefits of a multiple-currency system. But even the IMF says that using SDRs seems “doubtful unless the system…fails in a major way”.

[size=0.8em]The most radical solution of all is a new global currency that could be used in international transactions and would float alongside domestic currencies. The fund argues that this would have to be issued by a new international monetary institution “disconnected from the economic problems of any individual country”. This currency could serve as a risk-free global asset.

[size=0.8em]Radical as this may sound, it is not a new idea. John Maynard Keynes had something similar in mind when he proposed an International Clearing Union. This global bank would issue its own currency, called the bancor, in which all trade accounts would be settled. In the absence of such a bank the world will have to make do with the current system. So worries about the dollar’s value aside, its global dominance is secure for now.

[size=0.8em]For more information, please visit http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14842922&source=features_box_main and http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/sailorpj/68117.

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T-Paw stakes his claim
Nov 12th 2009 | ST PAUL
From The Economist print edition
The long, winding road to the Republican nomination
PRESIDENTIAL hopefuls find a natural habitat in Iowa. Before the caucuses, this energetic species can be seen marching in parades and munching pies at county fairs. Some, however, can be spotted by keen watchers a lot earlier than others. On November 7th Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota’s governor, gave the keynote speech at the Iowa Republicans’ annual autumn dinner. “Are you fired up?” he asked the crowd, echoing the young long-shot of 2008. “Are you ready to fight back?”
The answer, apparently, is not quite yet. In a field of veterans such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, Mr Pawlenty lags far behind. Seventy-two percent of respondents in a recent poll had no opinion of him at all. This has a least one advantage: Mr Pawlenty is a fresh face. Now his camp is trying to fashion him into the future of the party. But with Republicans in turmoil, Mr Pawlenty is proving just how difficult the road to 2012 will be.
Mr Pawlenty is in some ways a natural antidote to Barack Obama. He is young, just 48 years old (the same age as the president), and like him he has a compelling personal history. The son of a truck driver, he rose through the state legislature before winning the governor’s office in 2002. He is evangelical, anti-abortion and pro-gun, but manages to be all those things without appearing as abrasive as Mrs Palin. Most important, he describes himself as a fervent fiscal hawk. He has refused to raise state taxes, which Democrats say will leave Minnesota with gaping shortfalls. This year he slashed programmes from the budget unilaterally, a move being challenged in court. However, though Minnesota’s liberal voters may not like all of the governor’s policies, they do like “T-Paw”.
Mr Pawlenty is coy about his ambitions, but he is plainly looking beyond Minnesota’s borders. On October 1st he formed a political action committee with a suitably bland name (Freedom First) and a benign premise (electing other conservatives). He has become one of cable television’s most talkative heads. The speech in Iowa followed a big fund-raiser; Mr Pawlenty is now off to Florida and New Hampshire. All this is supposed to build a base of support. But there is also room for disaster.
In the era of tea-party conservatives, Mr Pawlenty is calculatedly veering to the right. Speaking to The Economist in St Paul, Minnesota, he recently explained that the earth might be warming, but that it is unclear “to what extent that is the result of natural causes.” After a blog called him “milquetoast establishment” for not endorsing a conservative candidate in New York over a moderate Republican, Mr Pawlenty hastily endorsed the conservative. A Democrat won the race. On November 3rd he questioned Olympia Snowe’s place within the Republican Party. He later called Ms Snowe, a moderate senator, to apologise.
Despite these swings, Mr Pawlenty insists that the best path to power is to uphold conservative tenets. “It’s about trying to convince Democrats and independents to join us because our views, our ideas, our values are hopefully attractive to them.” But the governor has his work cut out. “My base?” he asked in St Paul, and pointed to an aide and his dog.

caucus n. 干部会议v. 开干部会议
turmoil n. 骚动, 混乱
evangelical n. 信福音主义者 adj. 福音(书), 新教会的
shortfall n. 不足之量, 差额
unilaterally adj. 单方面的, 单边的, 片面的, 单系的
milquetoast n. 胆小者, 意志薄弱的人

银落UID：2632560

Music industry

How to sink pirates
Nov 12th 2009
From The Economist print edition

The decline of music piracy holds lessons for other industries

Illustration by Claudio Munoz
YOU open a window on your computer’s screen. You type in the name of a cheesy song from the 1980s. A list of results appears. You double-click on one of them, and within a few seconds the song is playing. This is what it was like to use Napster a decade ago; and it is also how Spotify, another free online-music service, works today. The difference? Napster was an illegal file-sharing service that was shut down by the courts. Spotify, by contrast, is an entirely legal, free service supported by advertising. This shows how much things have changed in the world of （在某个领域中~）online music in the past decade. It also explains why online music piracy may at last be in decline.

For most of the past decade the music industry focused on litigation（诉讼）
to try to prevent piracy. Over the years the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has accused 18,000 internet users of engaging in illegal file-sharing. Most of them settled, though two cases went to court this year. In both cases the defendants (a single mother and a student) lost and were ordered to pay damages (of $1.92m and $675,000 respectively). But the industry has realised that such cases encourage the publication of embarrassing headlines more than they discourage piracy（比喻用得超赞~，encourage the publication of embarrassing headlines来代替various case concerning illegal file-sharing）, for as each network was shut down, another would sprout in its place.

Yet as piracy flourished on illegal networks, legal alternatives also started to appear. Apple launched its iTunes Music Store, offering downloads at $0.99 per track, in 2003. Many others have followed, including a new, above-board version of Napster. And in the past two years new music sites and services have proliferated. Spotify offers free, advertising-supported streams（又是很漂亮的比喻~用stream来比喻源泉~）; paying customers are spared the ads and can use the service on smart-phones. Nokia’s Comes With Music scheme includes a year’s unlimited downloads in the price of some mobile phones. TDC, a Danish telecoms operator, bundles access to a music service with its broadband packages.

All of these different, legal music services offer the “celestial jukebox”—whatever you want, right away, from the internet—that made Napster so compelling when it appeared on the scene. True, revenue from these services will be less than from CD sales, but it is much better than nothing. The recorded-music industry will get smaller—but it will not disappear.

That is because there is growing evidence that this plethora of new services adds up to an attractive alternative to piracy for many (see article). In June a poll of Swedish users of file-sharing software found that 60% had cut back or stopped using it; of those, half had switched to advertising-supported streaming services like Spotify. In Denmark, over 40% of subscribers to TDC’s broadband-plus-music package also said they were making fewer illegal downloads as a result. In a British poll published in July, 17% of consumers said they used file-sharing services, down from 22% in December 2007. Music executives reckon people are moving from file-sharing networks to Spotify, though they may continue to download some music illegally.

To be sure, the carrots of more attractive legal services are being accompanied by innovative forms of stick.（很好的比喻，carrot和stick） In particular, a new approach called “graduated response” is gaining momentum. As its name indicates, it involves ratcheting up the pressure on users of file-sharing software by sending them warnings by e-mail and letter and then cutting off or throttling their internet access if they fail to respond after three requests. Graduated-response laws were introduced earlier this year in Taiwan and South Korea, and were enacted in France last month. Other countries are expected to follow suit.

But mainly carrots
Yet in Britain music file-sharing seems to be in decline even though a graduated-response law has yet to be introduced. The country also boasts one of the broadest selections of legal music services: Spotify and Comes With Music were both launched there before most other countries, and two of Britain’s biggest internet-service providers have borrowed TDC’s bundled-music model. This suggests that when it comes to discouraging music piracy, carrots may in fact be more important than sticks.

All of this offers a lesson for other types of media, such as films and video games. Piracy thrives because it satisfies an unmet demand. The best way to discourage it is to offer a diverse range of attractive, legal alternatives. The music industry has taken a decade to work this out, but it has now done so. Other industries should benefit from its experience—and follow its example.

Smartphone 智能手机
Telecom 电信
Bundle 捆绑
Broadband 宽带
Jukebox 自动唱片点唱机

StefanaUID：2143510

From The Times

November 21, 2009


Patients spreading drug-resistant swine flu strain
A form of swine flu that is resistant to antiviral drugs has begun spreading between hospital patients in Wales, health officials said.
A strain that appears resistant to Tamiflu, the most common treatment has infected five patients at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. All of them had serious underlying health conditions.
One patient apparently developed resistance to the antiviral drug and the strain was then passed on to others, the National Public Health Service for Wales (NPHS) said. The case is thought to be the first time in Europe that a drug-resistant strain has passed between people.
Two of the five patients have recovered and been discharged from hospital, one is in critical care and two are being treated on the ward. Britain has bought enough doses of Tamiflu, which can shorten the duration of swine flu and reduce the risk of complications, for half of the population.
There have been several dozen reports around the world of people developing resistance to Tamiflu, but there has been only one case of person-to-person transmission of a Tamiflu-resistant strain, between two people at a summer camp in the United States.
The Department of Health said that it was taking the cases seriously, but added that the risk to the general population was low.
“The Tamiflu-resistant virus has emerged in a group of particularly vulnerable individuals . . . these patients are known to be at increased risk of developing resistance to the drug, a spokesman for the Department of Health said.
“Our strategy to offer antivirals to all patients with swine flu is the right one — to help prevent complications and reduce the severity of the illness.”
The NPHS said that the resistant strain did not appear more severe than the virus circulating since the spring. All patients have been tested and those with the resistant strain have been given other antivirals.
Dr Roland Salmon, director of the NPHS Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre, said: “The emergence of influenza A viruses that are resistant to Tamiflu is not unexpected in patients with serious underlying conditions and suppressed immune systems, who still test positive for the virus despite treatment.
“In this case, the resistant strain of swine flu does not appear to be any more severe than the swine flu virus that has been circulating since April. For the vast majority of people, Tamiflu has proved effective in reducing the severity of illness.
“Vaccination remains the most effective tool we have in preventing swine flu so I urge people identified as being at risk to look out for their invitation to be vaccinated by their GP surgery.”

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过来狠狠赞一下~

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If words were food, nobody would go hungryNov 19th 2009 | ROME
From The Economist print edition

Investment in agriculture is soaring. So, worryingly, is distrust of markets and trade

“THE world’s attention is back on your cause.” That was Bill Gates talking to agricultural scientists gathered recently to honour the late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution. The tycoon-turned-philanthropist was right. This week, the world—in the guise of 60-odd heads of state including the pope—held the first United Nations food summit since 2002. As the world’s attention turns from the receding financial crisis, it is switching to one emerging in agriculture.
The UN conference on food security took place at a point of relative calm between two storms. The first occurred in 2007-08, when world food prices experienced their sharpest rise for 30 years. Food riots swept through three dozen countries and two governments (Haiti’s and Madagascar’s) were overthrown by the events that the price rises set in train.
The next storm is likely within a few years and everyone fears its arrival. The price spike of 2007-08 was the result of structural imbalances in the world food chain, not just temporary fluctuations like bad weather or government mistakes. These imbalances have not gone away: food demand is still rising because of changing appetites and rising incomes in emerging markets; biofuels are still competing with food crops for available land; yield growth in cereals is declining.
In 2008-09 food problems were masked for a while by the financial crisis. But as Jacques Diouf, head of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said this week, “when the recovery picks up, we will be back to square one.” Jeffrey Currie of Goldman Sachs argues that while most recession-hit industries in the rich world are operating at 60-70% of capacity, agriculture is at full capacity, in the sense that last year’s cereals crop was the largest on record and there is little fallow land ready to be taken under the plough. If there were another supply or demand shock, the farm-trade system would not cushion the blow.
It may not be many years away. In the first ten months of this year, food prices rose by 9.8%, prompting fears of a resumption of the surge that began in 2007, the first of the two years of crisis (see chart, left). The “breakfast commodities” (tea, cocoa, sugar, important sources of calories in some parts of the world) are trading at their highest levels for 30 years. Worse, the price respite, while it lasted, did nothing for the poorest and most vulnerable. According to the FAO, the number of malnourished people in the world rose to over 1 billion this year, up from 915m in 2008 (see chart, below). Economists at the World Bank reckon that the number living on less than $1.25 a day will rise by 89m between 2008 and 2010 and those on under $2 a day will rise by 120m. A quarter of a century after a famine in Ethiopia which dramatised failings in the food system, famine is again stalking the Horn of Africa. Has anything been done to prepare for future food shocks?
Certainly, say most governments. Money is starting to pour into agriculture after 30 years of neglect. There has been a spasm of institutional reform. And public and private sectors are doing more to help farmers than ever.
At their meeting in L’Aquila in July, the Group of Eight (G8) large rich economies promised to increase spending on agricultural development by $20 billion over the next three years. Not much of this was new money (probably $3 billion-5 billion) and it is not clear how much, if any, has been delivered. The amount also falls far short of the $44 billion that the FAO guesses will be needed each year to end malnutrition (and even shorter, aid agencies reflect, of the $14 trillion poured by rich countries into their banks). Still, the amount is not trivial. It would finance for three years the annual $7 billion that the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a think tank in Washington, DC, estimates will be the bill for developing countries to protect agriculture from the impact of climate change. And it excludes the far greater sums developing countries themselves are promising to farming.
Agriculture and food security have become “the core of the international agenda”, as the G8 called it. In 2009, the World Bank increased its spending on agriculture by 50%, to $6 billion. The Islamic Development Bank is creating an agriculture department for the first time.
Barack Obama asked Congress to double to just over $1 billion America’s aid for agricultural development in 2010. And in a sign that food productivity means more than warm words and cash, he nominated a pundit, not a politician, to head USAID, the assistance agency: Rajiv Shah, the chief scientist for the Department of Agriculture. In the West, there is a new consensus on the need to invest more in agriculture in emerging markets.
Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at America’s Columbia University, has argued that the next step should be to create a new international agency to co-ordinate all the money and perhaps have a big budget of its own. He wants something similar to the global fund to fight HIV/AIDS, a public-private partnership. Earlier food shortages, in the 1970s, had also produced institutional shake-ups: the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), influential groups in the field, were both set up then.
But the latest crisis has not spawned any institutional children, mainly because the UN food agencies—FAO, IFAD and the World Food Programme—spent too much time bickering. Instead, institution-building took the form of tinkering. The idea for what was grandly labelled a global partnership on food security began with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the spring of 2008 and morphed into a UN committee and a “high-level task force” attached to the secretary-general’s office. So far, this modest arrangement seems to be working rather well, at least in terms of mobilising attention and resources.
The most important activity, though, is taking place at the national level. Here, the price rises of 2007-08 have unleashed an unprecedented pack of policies. Practically every developing country, however cash-strapped, has done something (often a lot) to help farmers. African governments are finally starting to fulfil a promise they made in 2003 to spend 10% of their budgets on agriculture. The most popular measures have been to build rural roads, subsidise inputs such as seeds and fertilisers, give special help to the poorest smallholders as a kind of safety net, and to intervene in the operation of markets, sometimes to improve and sometimes to control them.
The Philippines set up a seed bank to improve the quality of seeds and provide a reserve against occasions when crops are wrecked by typhoons (the country is prone to such disasters). Lesotho and Uganda created “seed fairs” in the hope of increasing the varieties on offer to give farmers. Tanzania and Mali tried to achieve the same end by subsidising the grain and fertiliser merchants directly. Nepal and Jamaica offered cheap kits (pumps, drip feeds) to persuade smallholders to irrigate their fields. Malawi kept going its much-studied fertiliser subsidy, which practically gives the stuff away to the poorest farmers. The jury is still out on what will happen if and when the country can no longer afford the programme, which is eating up 4.2% of GDP. But there is no doubting the impact so far: the programme has turned Malawi into a breadbasket: in 2005, the country imported over 40% of its food; this year, it will export more than half its output, including to famine-stricken Kenya, having trebled the maize harvest in four years.
Brazil also subsidised inputs, launching a programme that provided credit for 14,000 tractors in its first year. But its bigger intervention was to expand a safety net which allows family farmers to sell $800 worth of food to the government each year; the government uses part of the food for reserves to help stabilise prices and another portion for school meals which are part of the country’s much-admired conditional-cash transfer scheme, Bolsa Familia.
Many countries are using help to farmers as an anti-poverty measure. India, for example, last year extended to every rural district its National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which guarantees 100 days of minimum-wage employment on public works to every rural household that asks for it. The act, one of the biggest job-creating schemes in the world, is widely credited with maintaining rural demand in the face of one of the worst monsoons for years. India also introduced a one-off agricultural-debt waiver programme for about 40m farmers.
At the height of the food-price spike in 2008, many of the biggest food producers banned the export of crops (they sought to cushion the domestic impact of rising world prices). Most of these restrictions have been lifted and replaced by a variety of price and marketing policies. Many of them are sensible. Uganda, for example, reckons farmers got 5-15% more for their crops after publishing price and market information more widely. Kenya improved peoples’ nutrition by removing restrictions on the sale of unpasteurised milk (milk is one of the most important foodstuffs in east Africa). There is also a fashion for creating grain reserves to smooth out local price fluctuations by building silos in villages: Burkina Faso, Burundi and Gambia are doing this.
It all sounds admirable. And it is matched by an almost equally frenetic pace of change among commercial food companies. Some have started to invest directly—often for the first time—in farming in poor countries, providing farmers with new varieties of seeds or drought- and disease-resistant plants (see article for a case study of Monsanto). Agricultural business centres—one-stop shops where farmers can go to buy seeds and fertilisers, rent farm equipment, and get crop insurance—are springing up everywhere.
This little piggy didn’t go to market
Yet there are worrying signs that all is not well. For alongside the increases in investment and attention is something more insidious: a turn away from trade, markets and efficiency. Depending on how far this goes, the trend could undo much of the benefits of new investment.
The price rises of 2008 were traumatic. When Thailand and Vietnam, the world’s two largest rice exporters, banned exports, the Philippines, the world’s largest importer, concluded that the international grain trade could no longer be trusted to supply its needs. Fearing what might happen as a result of India’s poor harvest this year, the Philippines in the past two weeks has concluded contracts to buy 1.5m tonnes of rice—equivalent to 5% of the total annual trade in the grain. This is panic buying driven by mistrust. In turn, India is negotiating directly with Thailand and Vietnam for rice, which would further reduce the tradable supply of an already thinly traded commodity.
The large “land grabs” in Africa and Asia are also signs of distrust in world markets. Food importers which can afford it—like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, China, South Korea—have opted to grow food on land they own or control abroad rather than import it through international trade. “Land grabbers” (mostly state companies or governments) have concluded contracts to buy or lease roughly 20m hectares (50m acres) of the best farmland in poor countries.
Trust in world grain markets seems weak among industrial countries, too. Western countries share the blame for the failure to complete the Doha round of trade talks. They have done little to reduce subsidies to biofuels, which have taken large quantities of maize out of food markets and put it into petrol tanks. IFPRI and others have urged countries to calm the wildest price fluctuations (and hence provide a measure of reassurance to importers) by setting up a system of international or regional grain reserves or by providing emergency financing to be drawn upon if prices spike. But the summit did nothing to improve the operation of world markets or to cut biofuels subsidies.
And just as distrust of world trade seems to be growing, so confidence in domestic markets seems to be falling. According to a review of national farm policies by the FAO, around two-thirds of developing countries have undertaken some sort of non-market-based measures to support farmers since 2007, including input subsidies and price interventions. The governments of Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone have started to negotiate with wholesalers to control prices indirectly. Other countries, such as Madagascar, have imposed direct price controls. The picture here is mixed: some countries are seeking to improve the operation of their markets. But six of 34 African countries which reported their policy responses to the FAO said they were proposing price controls.
Perhaps the most striking trend is the move from “food security” towards “food self-sufficiency” as a goal of national policy. The first means ensuring everyone has enough to eat; the second, growing it yourself. The Philippines says it hopes to grow 98% of the rice it needs by next year, though whether it can meet this target is unclear. “Indonesia must struggle to reach food self-sufficiency,” said President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono last year, announcing big increases in seed, fertiliser and credit subsidies. Senegal imports 80% of its rice, putting this small African nation in the top ten rice importers. Rocked by food riots in 2008, the government responded with what it called the “Great Offensive for Food and Abundance”, and promised to become self-sufficient in staples. Others with the same aim include China, Malaysia, Colombia and Honduras.
This shift towards self-sufficiency coincides with growing scepticism about world trade, examples of price controls and more extensive government involvement. The FAO has even suggested the shift may amount to “a change of paradigm” in farming.
Such a shift could undermine the hopes raised by new investment because farmers would get bogus price signals, efficiency would be compromised and because, says IFAD’s head of operation, “it’s harder to do good projects where the policy environment is poor.” Food policy has never been free. For the past 20 years, agriculture in developing countries has been dominated by a gradual decline in investment and a shift towards a somewhat more liberal policy environment. The first trend is now being reversed, for the better. The worry is that the second trend will be reversed, too—for the worse.

StefanaUID：2143510

Turning the screw some moreNov 24th 2009
From Economist.com
A UN report suggests that striking progress is being made in the fight against AIDS
ALL epidemics run their course. AIDS will be no exception. Butconcerted action can give them a helping hand to the finish line, andthe latest report from the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS, thetwo United Nations agencies charged with tackling the epidemic, claimsthat is what is happening.
The most important figure in the report, which was published onTuesday November 24th, is 17%. This is the estimated drop in the annualnumber of new infections compared with 2001, the year that the UnitedNations Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS was signed. The biggestproportionate fall, 25%, has been in East Asia. In sub-Saharan Africa,where the disease is most rampant, the decline is estimated at 15%.That corresponds to 400,000 fewer African infections in 2008 than in2001, though 1.9m Africans are still becoming infected each year.
      The death rate is also falling, as antiretroviral drugs becomeubiquitous. Over the five years to 2008, the report claims, the numberof AIDS-related deaths around the world fell by 10%, though it stillstands at about 2m annually.
A consequence of the falling death rate, of course, is that thereare more infected people who need treatment. The number of those“living with HIV”, to use the politically correct argot of the field,is somewhere between 31m and 36m. Not all of these people need drugsimmediately, but almost all will need them eventually. Since the drugsprolong life, but do not cure, the rising number of infected peoplewill provide a challenge to the pockets of rich-world taxpayers, theprincipal source of funds for these drugs in the poorest parts of theworld.
It is not clear how much the falling number of new infections is aresult of the activities of the agencies that distribute those funds,and the governments they support, in chivvying people to change theirbehaviour（为啥这里是单数呢？）. The report talks of the benefits of integrating HIVprevention and treatment programmes with other health andsocial-welfare services, and other such fine phrases, but the directconsequences of such things are hard to measure. What is clear, though,is that the spread of the drugs themselves has been crucial toprevention as well as treatment. In particular, the strategicdeployment of antiretrovirals to pregnant women has, the reportestimates, stopped some 200,000 mother-to-child infections in the 12years to 2008.
As to the cause of the drop in the adult infection rate, that isless certain. In this case, too, the drugs may be important. Althoughantiretroviral drugs do not cure the user, they cause the level of thevirus in his body to drop to a point where it is harmless—and alsounlikely to be passed on to sexual partners. The report quotes researchsuggesting that those on the drugs are only a tenth as likely totransmit the virus as those who are not.
The bad news—no report on AIDS would be complete without some—isthat there is evidence of a long-feared generalisation of the epidemicin some parts of the world where it has hitherto been confined togroups at special risk. It appears that the risky groups, such asintravenous drug users, and prostitutes and their clients, are startingto spread the virus, through sex, to others. This is particularly truein the case of drug users for eastern Europe and Central Asia, and forprostitutes’ clients in other parts of Asia. The overall message,though, is cautiously optimistic. AIDS may not yet be in full retreat,but progress is being made.

qqqaaazzzUID：2634671

[size=0.8em]China's currency
A yuan-sided argument
[size=0.7em]Nov 18th 2009 | HONG KONG
From
The Economist
print edition
Why China resists foreign demands to revalue its currency

[size=0.74em]Shutterstock

[size=0.8em]PRESIDENT Barack Obama, on his first visit to China this week, urged the government to allow its currency to rise. President Hu Jintao politely chose to ignore him. In recent weeks Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, have also called for a stronger yuan. But China will adjust its currency only when it sees fit, not in response to foreign pressure.

[size=0.8em]China allowed the yuan to rise by 21% against the dollar in the three years to July 2008, but since then it has more or less kept the rate fixed. As a result, the yuan’s trade-weighted value has been dragged down this year by the sickly dollar, while many other currencies have soared. Since March the Brazilian real and the South Korean won have gained 42% and 36% respectively against the yuan, seriously eroding those countries’ competitiveness.

[size=0.8em]Speculation about a change in China’s currency policy increased in the week before Mr Obama’s visit, after the People’s Bank of China tweaked the usual wording in its quarterly monetary-policy report. It dropped a phrase about keeping the yuan “basically stable” and added that foreign-exchange policy will take into account “international capital flows and changes in major currencies”. But exchange-rate policy is decided by the State Council, not the central bank. And many policymakers, notably in the Ministry of Commerce, do not favour a revaluation right now.

[size=0.8em]Indeed, Chinese officials have become bolder in standing up to Washington. “We don’t think that it’s good for the world economic recovery, and it is also unfair, that you ask others to appreciate while you depreciate your own currency,” said a spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce on November 16th. The previous day Liu Mingkang, China’s chief banking regulator, blasted Washington for its low interest rates and for the falling dollar, which, he claimed, was encouraging a dollar carry trade and global asset-price bubbles. He strangely ignored the fact that China’s own overly lax monetary policy, partly the result of its fixed exchange rate, is fuelling bubbles in shares and property.

[size=0.8em]Foreigners argue that a stronger yuan would not only help reduce global imbalances, such as America’s trade deficit, but would also benefit China. It would help China regain control of its monetary policy. By pegging to the dollar, it is, in effect, importing America’s monetary policy, which is too loose for China’s fast growing economy. A stronger yuan would also help rebalance China’s economy, making it less dependent on exports, putting future growth on a more sustainable path.

[size=0.8em]If a stronger exchange rate is in China’s own interest, why does it resist? Beijing rejects the accusation that its exchange-rate policy has given it an unfair advantage. It is true that other emerging-market currencies have risen sharply this year, but this ignores the full picture. Last year China held its currency steady against the dollar throughout the global financial crisis, while others tumbled. Since the start of 2008, the yuan has actually risen against every currency except the yen.

[size=0.8em]Beijing also argues that it has done a lot to help global rebalancing. Thanks to its monetary and fiscal stimulus, domestic demand has contributed an incredible 12 percentage points to GDP growth this year, while net exports subtracted almost four percentage points. Its current-account surplus has almost halved to around 6% of GDP from 11% in 2007. Chinese policymakers accept that the yuan needs to appreciate over the longer term, but say now is the wrong time, because exports are still falling, by 14% over the past 12 months.

[size=0.8em]Another reason for hesitation is that the theory that revaluing the yuan will allow Beijing to tighten its monetary policy is too simplistic. China’s experience since 2005 shows that a gradual rise encourages investors to bet on further appreciation; hot-money inflows then swell domestic liquidity. A large one-off increase might work, as it would stem expectations of a further rise. But the sort of increase required—perhaps 25%—is politically unacceptable because it would put many exporters out of business overnight.

[size=0.8em]Some Chinese economists warn that the benefits to America from yuan revaluation are much exaggerated. In particular, a stronger yuan would not significantly reduce America’s trade deficit. There is little overlap between American and Chinese production, so American goods cannot replace Chinese imports. Instead, consumers would simply end up paying more for imports either from China or other producers, such as Vietnam. This would be like imposing a tax on American consumers.

[size=0.8em]These arguments help explain why China is dragging its feet. Nevertheless, in the long run, a stronger yuan would benefit China’s economy—and the world’s—by helping shift growth from investment and exports towards consumption. It would boost consumers’ purchasing power and squeeze corporate profits, which have accounted for most of the increase in China’s excessive domestic saving in recent years. China will probably allow the yuan to start rising again early next year. This will not be the result of foreign lobbying—indeed, China is more likely to change its policy if foreign policymakers shut up. But by early next year China’s exports should be growing again, its year-on-year GDP growth could be close to 10%, and its inflation rate will have turned positive. The arguments in favour of revaluation will then loom much larger.

[size=0.8em]For more information, please visit http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14901104&source=most_commented and http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/sailorpj/69882.

rafaelUID：2702393

我终于开始看阅读了

林小乔UID：2648630

The Copenhagen climate-change conference
Searching for harmonyDec 7th 2009 | COPENHAGEN
From Economist.com
Will the Copenhagen climate conference end with a deal on carbon emissions?
DELEGATES turning up to the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—known as the Copenhagen conference—face a fortnight of negotiation, beginning on Monday December 7th, almost as rich in complexity as in hyperbole. The range of different possibilities in the negotiations means that there is, potentially, something for everyone, which raises hopes for success. At the same time, there is the near certainty of almost everyone being disappointed to some extent.

The conference has two different sets of aims, which may well be united into one road forward by the end. One set of negotiations is on the Kyoto protocol. The protocol, negotiated in 1997, entered into force in 2005 and imposes targets for carbon-emission reductions on developed countries for the period 2008 to 2012. It imposes no obligations on developing countries, but did set up the clean development mechanism (CDM) by which developed countries could meet commitments by reducing emissions in developing countries, transferring capital in their direction in the process. One track of the Copenhagen negotiations deals with the requirement under Kyoto to agree terms for a second commitment period after 2012, with new and tougher levels of emission reductions dealt with in the existing regime.

The other main track of negotiation is on “long-term co-operative action”—finding a way to a new protocol that would involve commitments of some sort from developing countries. Many richer countries are keen that these negotiations should produce something along these lines to replace the ongoing Kyoto commitments. Many poorer countries are not so keen, and want any new agreement to sit alongside new legally binding (though not necessarily legally enforceable) limits negotiated under Kyoto.

As delegates began speaking, they largely restated old positions. A Sudanese representative, speaking for the poor Group of 77 countries and China, excoriated the rich world’s unwillingness to put up more money for the poor ones, for example. In the run up to the conference, various countries have staked out their positions. America, which has not ratified Kyoto, has offered emissions cuts that would take it 3% below 1990 levels by 2020. The EU is offering at least a 20% cut with respect to 1990 levels, and says it is willing to go up to 30% as part of an ambitious deal. Overall, developed countries are offering reductions of about 16% compared with 1990.

Some poorer countries, such as South Africa, are also offering proposed emission reductions, though they will not necessarily be willing to have them made binding. A lot of these depend on payments from developed countries that will help developing countries to slow deforestation and other land-use changes which emit carbon dioxide. A deal on these payments, which goes by the name of REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, which becomes REDD+ if conservation issues are added to the mix), is a high priority for environmental organisations and the countries which stand to benefit.

The largest developing-world emitters, China and India, are offering cuts to the “carbon intensity” of their economies—the amount of carbon emitted per dollar of GDP. For an historically fast-growing country like China, a large cut in intensity (40% below 2005 levels by 2020) is quite compatible with continuing growth in absolute emissions.

According to an eve-of-conference update by Nicholas Stern, a British economist, the various offers on the table would, if enacted, add up to about 80% of the reductions required for a good chance of keeping overall global warming to 2°C. Bigger cuts would make the chances of such an outcome better. But the provisos and conditions attached to the current offers will make for high hurdles. Some of the most contentious problems surround the hundreds of billions of dollars that poorer countries want transferred from richer ones to cover the costs of reduced emissions and adaptation to the changes that are already inevitable; how much money might be offered, and by what mechanisms, is an important negotiating point. Kyoto's CDM mechanism was not designed for such flows, and may well need reform even if other channels open up.

There is all but universal agreement that the negotiations will not end in a new protocol, or a binding extension of the old protocol. What they might provide is the outline of a deal on most of the important issues that could be turned into a legal protocol early next year; Copenhagen could, though, provide considerably less than that.

adammaksimUID：2675466

问个问题~~
And here the controversy begins.For the mine’s security, in a land that epitomizes insecurity, is paid for by others.
For是做因为讲么,可以这么用的么，是不是应该向下面这么用呢？
And here the controversy begins，for the mine’s security, in a land that epitomizes insecurity, is paid for by others.

qqqaaazzzUID：2634671

问个问题~~
And here the controversy begins.For the mine’s security, in a land that epitomizes insecurity, is paid for by others.
For是做因为讲么,可以这么用的么，是不是应该向下面这么用呢？
And here ...
adammaksim 发表于 2009-12-10 23:49

我觉得原文可以吧，我不太精通语法。。不过我是这么想的，And here the controversy begins.是上一段的一个总结，对于本段来说，后面的内容都是来解释这句话的，所以这句话可以算是独立的，用句号应该并无不可吧，LS很细心。。。赞一个。。不过我觉得不用过分抠语法。。

StefanaUID：2143510

问个问题~~
And here the controversy begins.For the mine’s security, in a land that epitomizes insecurity, is paid for by others.
For是做因为讲么,可以这么用的么，是不是应该向下面这么用呢？
And here ...
adammaksim 发表于 2009-12-10 23:49

For在这里作conj用，可以这么用的。

adammaksimUID：2675466

多谢二位~~

qqqaaazzzUID：2634671

[size=0.8em]The Copenhagen climate talks
Filthy lucre fouls the air   [size=0.7em]Dec 10th 2009 | COPENHAGEN
From
The Economist
print edition
Arguments over money dampened the euphoria at the start of the Copenhagen climate talks

[size=0.8em]DESPITE the gloomy talk that preceded the UN climate conference, the opening was upbeat. Most big countries had vowed to cut or limit emissions during the previous few weeks. As delegates arrived, America’s Environmental Protection Agency announced that carbon-dioxide emissions were an “endangerment” to health. This allows Barack Obama to regulate them, whatever Congress does.

[size=0.8em]The happiness did not last. On December 8th a draft agreement which had been discussed some weeks ago was leaked to the Guardian, a British newspaper. It caused a furore. The “Danish text” had been circulated by the hosts, but not to all parties; and it seems to confirm the futility of moves towards the legally binding treaty that many still want.

[size=0.8em]It also seems to link any rich-to-poor transfers of money to specific actions taken by developing countries to curb emissions. Embarrassed Danes said the text was one of several unofficial papers that had been floated, not a basis for real bargaining. The lead negotiator for the “G77 plus China” group of developing countries, Lumumba Di-Aping, was unsoothed. “This text…is a major violation that threatens the success of the Copenhagen negotiations,” he fumed, saying two years’ work had been swept aside.

[size=0.8em]Can there still be a deal? The main obstacle may not be emissions cuts, which will not change much, but the closely linked issues of the shape of a deal and how much money it involves.

[size=0.8em]Everyone agrees that poorer countries, including India and China, need cash for climate “mitigation”—adopting green technology and new approaches to land use and forest conservation—and for “adaptation”: coping with the anticipated effects of climate change, some of which (like a degree of sea level rise) look unavoidable. America has joined the list of countries accepting such transfers, saying it will pay its “fair share”. Rich countries have talked of a “quick start” fund. The leaked Danish text has it starting in 2010-12 at a value to be determined; the UN has suggested $10 billion. To poor countries, this sounds paltry: responses range from “bribery” to “it will not even pay for the coffins”. Instead, the G77 has asked for 0.5% to 1% of the rich countries’ GDPs. That implies hundreds of billions of dollars on top of existing development aid. The idea that rich countries will hand over 1.2% to 1.7% of their wealth in perpetuity is not going to fly.

[size=0.8em]Some transfers occur already. Rich states meet emissions targets by paying poor countries to do the cutting, under Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism. This system is under fire in Copenhagen for being too choosy or too arbitrary in the projects it backs. It is also too small: it abates only 330m tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, and billions of tonnes must be cut.

[size=0.8em]On Thursday, George Soros, a philanthropist, proposed turning on a much bigger tap: he wants a new use of Special Drawing Rights, effectively the IMF’s in-house gold-backed “currency”, mainly held by the rich countries. The IMF extended an extra $153 billion to rich countries last year to help them with the financial crisis. Most of it was unused. Mr Soros wants rich countries to lend $100 billion-worth to poor ones, creating a “green fund” to jump-start mitigation. The IMF’s gold reserves could pay the (small) interest amounts that poor countries would otherwise owe.

[size=0.8em]Other proposals abound. The REDD initiative on forestry should move lots of money to countries which avoid felling trees. If emissions from ships and aircraft are cut, using a tax or an emissions market, that could provide cash. Less promisingly, France wants a levy on financial transactions. And the European Climate Foundation, a think-tank, says more could be taken from existing carbon markets: cash could be winkled from traders who arbitrage the price difference between green projects in poor places and the “allocation” paid by rich-world emitters.

[size=0.8em]The question of who gets paid what, and how, feeds back into the main issue in these and inevitable future talks: to what extent will obligations under the Kyoto protocol be extended beyond the developed countries to developing ones? Rich countries account for most of the past emissions that now fill the air, but less than half the world’s current emissions.

[size=0.8em]Settling this question will mean some differentiation between developing countries, a term that includes both industrial giants and hapless victims, whose interests are very different. Some people think this was the reason for the leaking of the Danish text. Those most offended by it are the smallest, weakest countries, which are vulnerable and emit very little. They are more interested in strong action than in who pays for it or who has to make the cuts. The calculus is different for the larger, more industrialised emerging markets, at least four of which—Brazil, India, South Africa and China—saw the text before it was leaked. They have more to gain from keeping the onus of action and payment on the developed world alone.

[size=0.8em]These countries have produced their own draft document, which would absorb any new agreement into the existing Kyoto framework. If the leak serves to firm up resistance to a deal that spreads the duties of reduction wider, China and other large developing states may be the gainers