waging war recessions

to fight a war or organize a series of activities in order to achieve something

第一段

Since the emergence of the welfare state , adults who want to work have generally found themselves in one of two positions : earning a wage from their job or receiving unemployment benefits. The pandemic has led many people to find themselves in a halfway stage-furlough.This often involves the state paying a large slice of employees' wages so that firms can keep them on the pay-roll during the lockdown

重点词汇

• welfare

  • help given, especially by the state or an organization, to people who need it,

    • Your taxes pay for welfare benefits such as unemployment and sickness pay.
    • After her month's sick leave, she was summoned to see the company's welfare officer.
    • It is widely acknowledged that the welfare system is under-resourced.
    • The whole scheme is intended to wean people off welfare dependency.

• benefit

  • a helpful or good effect, or something intended to help

    • The discovery of oil brought many benefits to the town.
    • One of the many benefits of foreign travel is learning how to cope with the unexpected.
    • He's had the benefit of an expensive education and yet he continues to work as a waiter.
    • I didn't get/derive (much) benefit from school.

• furlough

  • a period of time that a worker or a soldier is allowed to be absent, especially to return temporarily to their own town or country

    • No furloughs were given, and the men lived in tents.
    • Due to decreased property values, in 2009 the district announced that furloughs, layoffs, and wage freezes would occur.
    • Employees were forced to take five-day furloughs, and the company reduced its pension benefits to employees.
    • The end of 1916 saw his departure on furloughs; consequently, he spent little time in combat during this period.

• payroll

  • a list of the people employed by a company showing how much each one earns

    • a payroll tax
    • The company is growing fast, adding another 100 employees to its payroll over the last year.
    • Also, with organic production, payrolls and proprietor incomes were higher.

第二段

How effective is this approach? A new paper by Morten Bennedsen of INSEAD business school in France and colleagues surveyed 8,781 Danish firms with anywhere between the three and 2,000 employees.Around two-thirds of the firms said that the effect of the pandemic on their revenues had been negative, or very negative. Of those companies that had experienced a fall in revenues, the median decline was 35%.

重点词汇

• approach

  • a way of considering or doing something

    • Since our research so far has not produced any answers to this problem, we need to adopt a different approach to it.
    • I've just read an interesting book which has a new approach to Shakespeare.
    • Michael is always very logical in his approach.

• employee

  • someone who is paid to work for someone else

    • The number of employees in the company has trebled over the past decade.
    • She's a former state employee/employee of the state.
    • If any employee needs to take time off, s/he should contact the Personnel Department.
    • Annabel has been a hardworking and responsible employee.
    • The police want to interview every employee about the theft.

• revenue

  • the income that a government or company receives regularly

    • Taxes provide most of the government's revenue.
    • Government revenues fell dramatically.
    • These measures will increase the club's ability to generate revenue.
    • Television companies have been massaging their viewing figures in order to attract more advertising revenue.

• decline

  • to gradually become less, worse, or lower

    • His interest in the project declined after his wife died.
    • The party's popularity has declined in the opinion polls.
    • The land declines sharply away from the house.
    • The latest opinion poll shows that the president's popularity has declined.
    • Profits have declined as a result of the recent drop in sales.

第三段

The Danish government offered a variety of financial-aid programmes to firms , including a furlough scheme which paid 75% of salary costs(subject to a cap) to eligible companies.The academics found that 56% of the firms surveyed had taken some form of government aid and this was true of almost all businesses that had suffered a revenue decline of more than 50%.Unsurprisingly , companies in the most distressed industries were most likely to have taken assistance.

重点词汇

• variety

  • the characteristic of often changing and being different

    • When planning meals, you need to think about variety and taste as well as nutritional value.
    • Sexual reproduction serves to create genetic variety.
    • Work on the production line is monotonous and lacks variety.
    • This variety of tomato is particularly good, and is resistant to disease.
    • I like almost every variety of cheese.
    • I suppose you mix with a wide variety of people in your job.

• scheme

  • an officially organized plan or system

    • Under the current marking/mark scheme, you need 90 percent to get an A.
    • a training/housing/play scheme
    • a pension/savings scheme
    • There's a new scheme in our town for recycling plastic bottles.

• eligible

  • having the necessary qualities or satisfying the necessary conditions

    • Are you eligible for early retirement/maternity leave?
    • You might be eligible for a grant.
    • Only people over 18 are eligible to vote.
    • Is he eligible for a pension?

第四段

The aid seemed to work. Firms that received it laid off fewer workers and furloughed more people than firms which received no aid at all. But , as the authors of the study point out , this definition of success might be subject to a selection bias-firms that wanted to furlough workers may have been likelier to apply for aid

重点词汇

• aid

  • help or support

    • He gets about with the aid of a walking stick.
    • She went to the aid of a man trapped in his car.
    • A woman in the street saw that he was in trouble and came to his aid.

第五段

So they also asked firms a counterfactual question what decisions would they have taken had they been unable to get rid? On this basis, the researchers estimate that taking the aid increased a firm's furloughed workers as a share of its total workforce by about 20 percentage points, and decreased the share of laid-off workers by almost the same amount

重点词汇

• counterfactual

  • thinking about what did not happen but could have happened, or relating to this kind of thinking

    • Thoughts about how an embarrassing event might have turned out differently are known to psychologists as counterfactual thinking.
    • This is so because strong indifference is now ascertained by means of a counterfactual situation.
    • The problem is that given such a broad definition it is difficult to imagine a counterfactual conditional for stakeholder.

第六段

If these findings are replicated elsewhere, furlough schemes may be adopted in future recessions. Some commentators point to the record of Germany, which suffered a much smaller rise in unemployment than other rich countries during the recession in 2008-09 because of a scheme that subsidised short-term working.

重点词汇

• commentator

  • a reporter for radio or television who provides a spoken description of and remarks on an event

    • a radio commentator
    • a sports/football commentator.

• subsidize

  • to pay part of the cost of something

    • £50 would help to subsidize the training of an unemployed teenager.
    • The refugees live in subsidized housing provided by the authorities.
    • All private universities are subsidized by the government.
    • He raises the question as to whether the fine arts should be subsidized by public funds.

第七段

There are two obvious concerns about such support schemes.The first is the cost.The British scheme, which started in March, is expected to cost around $75bn by the scheduled end in October, or a bit less than 3% of GDP.The second problem is that such schemes may prevent the necessary role that recessions play in "creative destruction", whereby resources are reallocated from failing businesses to successful ones.The survival of "zombie" companies may make the next recovery less vigorous.

重点词汇

• vigorous

  • very forceful or energetic

    • a vigorous debate
    • There has been vigorous opposition to the proposals for a new road.
    • He takes plenty of vigorous exercise.

第八段

On cost, the counterargument is that widespread job lesses lead to deep recessions and thus sharp declines in government revenues. They can also be bad news for laid-off workers who may take years to find another job. Paying money upfront to reduce the severity of a recession can thus be a good investment in both social and economic terms.

重点词汇

• lay sb off

  • to stop employing someone, usually because there is no work for them to do

    • Because of falling orders, the company has been forced to lay off several hundred workers.
    • He was laid off last week.
    • We have had to lay off all our workers.
    • She became depressed after being laid off from the factory.
    • We are doing all we can to avoid laying off staff.

• upfront

  • speaking or behaving in a way that makes intentions and beliefs clear

    • She's very upfront about why she wants the job - she'd earn a lot more money.
    • Costs were not discounted, because all costs considered were incurred upfront.

• severity

  • seriousness

    • Even the doctors were shocked by the severity of his injuries.
    • I don't think you quite understand the severity of our financial problems.

第九段

It Would be great if governments could save only companies that have a viable long-term future . The analogy might be an old rule of thumb among central bankers that they should lend money in financial crises to banks that have a liquidity problem, not a solvency one.In practice , however, financial crises in recent decades have been unable or unwilling to discriminate .Similarly , while governments have imposed conditions on wage-support schemes in the current crisis, their main priority had been to dole out aid as quickly as possible in order to save jobs.

重点词汇

• analogy

  • a comparison between things that have similar features, often used to help explain a principle or idea

    • He drew an analogy between the brain and a vast computer.
    • It is sometimes easier to illustrate an abstract concept by analogy with (= by comparing it with) something concrete.

• solvency

  • the ability to pay all the money that is owed:

    • Questions were raised about the financial solvency of the university.
    • The tax system is so full of holes that the country's solvency is threatened.
    • The tax cut has threatened the long-term solvency of those programs.

• discriminate

  • to treat a person or particular group of people differently, especially in a worse way from the way in which you treat other people,

    • She felt she had been discriminated against because of her age.
    • In order to increase the number of female representatives, the selection committee decided to discriminate in favour of women for three years.

• dole sth out

  • to give something, usually money, to several people

    • Young people on (= receiving) the dole are often bored and frustrated.
    • If I can't find any work within a month, I'll have to go on the dole.

第十段

A lot more research is clearly needed to see whether furlough support schemes will have adverse long-term economic effects. The longer the schemes are in place, the more likely it is that market distortions will occur.But the principle that governments should intervene to support struggling banks and unemployed workers, as a way of reducing the severity of recessions, has long been established.It is conceivable to think that furlough schemes might eventually be viewed in the same light.

重点词汇

• distortion

  • a change to the intended or true meaning of something:

    • a gross distortion of the facts
    • Nobody has challenged his distortions on education and the economy.

• intervene

  • to intentionally become involved in a difficult situation in order to improve it or prevent it from getting worse:

    • The Central Bank intervened in the currency markets today to try to stabilize the exchange rate.
    • The minister intervened personally to stop the museum from being closed.
    • There is increasing demand for the United Nations to intervene in trouble spots throughout the world.