gordeeva_o_g_praktikum_po_perevodu_ekonomicheskih_tekstov_s

quarter, labour productivity grew by 5.3%, the fastest rate for 19 years. In contrast, the European Central Bank's latest figures showed virtually no increase in productivity in the euro area in the year to the second quarter. Since the mid-1990s America's productivity growth has quickened, Europe's has collapsed.

Europe's failure to reap the same productivity gains as America is often blamed on its more rigid labour and capital markets, which prevent firms from taking full advantage of information technology (IT). But this is overly simplified. Not only is the productivity gap between America and Europe exaggerated by measurement problems; labour-productivity growth is also a poor gauge of Europe's performance, since labourmarket reforms are meant to pull lower-skilled workers back into jobs.

There are many ways to measure productivity. America has chosen the most flattering one, the euro area the least flattering. American official statistics use output per man-hour in the non-farm business sector. Growth in this averaged 2.3% a year in the five years to 2001. By contrast, the productivity figures that the ECB publishes for the euro area use GDP per worker in the whole economy. Growth of this has averaged less than 1% over the past five years. Unlike America's, this measure includes the public sector, which tends to have slower productivity growth. By taking output per worker rather than output per hour, it also ignores the fact that average hours worked have fallen as part-time jobs have risen, depressing average output per worker.

One important difference is the treatment of computer software. American statisticians count firms' spending on software as investment, so it contributes to final GDP. In the euro area, software is instead largely counted as a current expense, and so is excluded from final output. The surge in spending on software in the late 1990s therefore inflated America's growth rate relative to Europe's.

The Upside and Downside of Outsourcing

A closer examination of the international data reveals not only that U.S. companies are outsourcing abroad but also that foreign companies are outsourcing to the U.S. at a record rate, thus creating high-paying jobs in the U.S. International data from 2004 reveal that U.S. imports of

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services amounted to $296 billion, but exports of U.S. services was $343 billion – an absolute record – giving the U.S. a balance-of-trade surplus of $47 billion in services. Unfortunately, the U.S. has a deficit in manufacturing, in 2005 exporting only $807 billion and importing $1.47 trillion.

Outsourcing highlights the changing structure of the U.S. economy, with about 80% of workers employed in services, about 19% in manufacturing, and only 1% in farming. With more than 100 million U.S. workers now in services, outsourcing is expected to grow at an exponential rate in the next decade, forming a larger share of the U.S. trade balance and giving the U.S. a comparative advantage in services.

Offshoring

Economists argue that offshoring is a win-win phenomenon

Offshoring—the wholesale shifting of corporate functions and jobs (particularly those of back-office workers in it and accounting-type roles) to overseas territories—is what gave outsourcing a bad name. It is important, however, to note a crucial distinction between the two:

•Outsourcing need not necessarily result in job losses in a particular territory or country. A job can simply be handed over to another organisation of the same nationality and geographical location where (the company handing it over hopes) it can be carried out more efficiently. Sometimes that other organisation may be in another country, but more often than not it is not.

•Offshoring, however, does involve shifting jobs to another country, but it may not involve transferring jobs to another organisation. For example, a company may simply decide to move its local customer services operation to one of its own subsidiaries abroad. That is offshoring, but it is not outsourcing.

Economists argue that offshoring is a win-win phenomenon: the country that sends the work abroad gains from lower costs, and the country that gains the work gets extra jobs. But countries sometimes panic about the scale of offshoring. When production jobs moved en masse to China and other cheap labour destinations, rich-world

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governments did not worry unduly because they thought that their workers could glide painlessly from manufacturing jobs to service jobs. Who, they thought, would begrudge giving up a lifetime on the factory floor for a lifetime in a clean, antiseptic office?

The real problem arose when the service jobs also started to go abroad, when every other service company’s call centre suddenly seemed to be based in Bangalore, in the middle of India, not Indiana. What were western workers going to move on to this time, once they had been priced out of the services sector?

At one stage, Americans became almost hysterical about the issue. A 2004 report by Forrester Research, a highly reputable firm, estimated that 3.3m American jobs would have gone offshore by 2015. This was immediately taken as a known fact. But the author of the report subsequently told the Wall Street Journal that his estimates were no more than “educated guesses”. As one commentator said: “The public’s intense desire to understand the scope of the problem has bred a reliance on statistics that even [Forrester] admits are based heavily on guesswork.”

In practice, the hysteria died down, even as the benefits of offshoring were being questioned more and more. Managers found it increasingly difficult to manage far-flung service operations in cultures they did not understand, and firms began to bring some functions back to their home base—especially call centres, where customers often found it difficult to explain localised problems to someone working in a totally different climate in a totally different time zone. Indeed, in 2006 an Indian call-centre operator opened a new centre in Northern Ireland.

Closely allied to offshoring is the concept of nearshoring, a phenomenon whereby companies shift operations, often IT-related ones, to foreign countries that are close to their own, but where they can still gain a labour-cost advantage—from the United States, for example, where Spanish is the second language, to Mexico; or from Japan to the Chinese city of Dalian, which was occupied by the Japanese for many years and where there are Japanese-speakers. Nearby countries are more likely to speak the same language as the country of the corporation doing the offshoring; they are more easily accessible at short notice; and they are unlikely to leave the short-stay visitor with jet lag.

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Outsourcing

A quick fix

Companies are seeking outsiders’ help to squeeze more out of their equipment

As car dealers know only too well, the global downturn has made people think twice before splashing out on pricey new machines. Instead they are trying to make their existing sets of wheels last longer. Like car owners, managers faced with a cash crunch are also keen to get as much extra mileage as possible out of their existing equipment rather than buying costly new gear. To do so, some have been turning to “asset maintenance” companies, which specialise in taking over all or part of a firm’s servicing activities and then running them more efficiently.

“Downturns have always been good for the maintenance-service business,” says Jari Kaija, the head of the global service arm of ABB, a Swiss-Swedish firm that is one of the biggest in the asset-maintenance field. This slump is unlikely to break that rule. A recent study by Frost & Sullivan, a research firm, predicts that the $125 billion market for outsourced-maintenance services in North America will continue to grow as firms push ageing machines to their limits on the one hand, and try to reduce head count on the other.

More deals are likely in Europe, too. In January ABB kicked off what it claims is the biggest-ever outsourced-maintenance agreement in the pulp-and-paper industry. Together with Stora Enso, a Finnish paperproducts firm, it has set up a joint venture to take over servicing and repairs at six of Stora’s Finnish mills. Some 1,450 of Stora’s staff have been transferred to the new company, which is expected to have up to $270m a year in revenues. Stora has been badly battered by the downturn and urgently needs to cut costs. On February 5th the company announced that it made a net loss of €675m ($988m) in 2008, following a net loss of €212m in 2007.

Outsourcing firms such as ABB and Advanced Technology Services (ATS), an American company, promise to help clients save money not only by offloading repair workers, but also by getting remaining ones to work better. They can reduce costs by consolidating spare-parts suppliers, introducing more sophisticated machinemonitoring systems and encouraging better forward-planning and co-

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operation between engineering and production staff. Rod Bayliss, a manager who oversees outsourced maintenance for Eaton, an American industrial company with $15 billion in annual sales, says ATS has helped it anticipate problems with machinery.

Outsourcing firms sometimes discover that their clients are spending too much to keep machines up and running. “It’s often engineers at play,” quips Andrew Jardine, the director of the Centre for Maintenance Optimisation and Reliability Engineering at the University of Toronto. Bill Wasilewski of Fluor, another American assetmaintenance firm, says it sometimes has to persuade clients that occasional breakdowns are acceptable because the cost of preventive maintenance turns out to be far greater than the cost of lost production when a machine temporarily fails.

The downturn means that many factories are lying idle. Some bosses may be tempted to axe maintenance work—and workers— altogether, because they have plenty of spare capacity. But that could be risky. For one thing, mothballed plants may suddenly need to be brought back to life if demand shifts. Getting them running again will be much more difficult if equipment has been neglected. For another, firms could all too easily lose vital knowledge that is locked up in the heads of their in-house repair folk. That really would throw a spanner in the works.

Delta ends use of call centers based in India

Delta Air Lines Inc. has stopped using India-based call centers to handle sales and reservations, making it the latest U.S. company to decide the cost benefits of directing calls offshore are outweighed by customer backlash.

Delta said Friday it stopped routing calls to India-based call centers in the first quarter. Customers had complained they had trouble communicating with Indian agents, the airline said. Last month, Chrysler LLC said it would move its customer-service center back from India.

“It is fundamentally cheaper to do it in India, but there’s also the question of whether it’s better to do it cheaper or better to do it better in terms of the relationship with your customers,” said Ben Trowbridge, chief executive of Alsbridge Inc., a Dallas-based outsourcing consultant.

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Call-center representatives in India earn roughly $500 a month, or about one-sixth the salary of their U.S.-based counterparts, he said.

Delta’s move also reflects the need for airlines to streamline their sales and reservation operations as customer-call volume dwindles amid the continuing recession. And, as layoffs mount in the U.S., it could be a smart public-relations move for companies to cut their outsourced business before eliminating payroll positions.

For Indian companies that handle such business, the moves increase the pressure they’re already under because of the global economic slowdown. The Indian outsourcing industry has been struggling to get back on its feet amid the global recession in India and growing protectionist sentiment in the U.S. American customers account for more than 60% of Indian outsources’ revenue, and the industry has seen its once-steaming growth come to an essential standstill as the U.S. economy slowed.

Bangalore-based Infosys Technologies Ltd., India’s second-largest outsourcer by revenue, last week gave a dismal forecast for the fiscal year that began April 1, saying it expected revenue in dollar terms to be as much as 15% below a year earlier.

Yet while outsourcers in Bangalore and Mumbai had significant declines in their computer-related businesses, such as programming and server maintenance, nontech services like call centers were still in demand.

SLM Corp., the student lender known as Sallie Mae, recently said it would return to the U.S. 2,000 jobs it outsources in India, The Philippines and Mexico. The jobs, mostly callcenters and informationtechnology positions, were moved overseas as part of a plan last year to trim 4,000 jobs from the company’s overall U.S. payroll of 12,000 employees.

Delta was one of a handful of carriers, including U.S. Airways Group Inc. and UAL Corp.’s United Airlines, that sent parts of their telephone-based sales and reservation duties offshore as they scrambled to cut costs after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when demand for travel plummeted.

Delta isn’t pulling back from the use of all foreign call centers. It will keep some Jamaica and South Africa centers, which haven’t generated such vociferous complaints.

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История аутсорсинга в России

Использование аутсорсинга - передачи части работ, услуг или процессов на исполнение внешним организациям - становится повседневной бизнес-практикой для сотен и тысяч отечественных компаний. По данным различных опросов и исследований, более 80% руководителей отечественных предприятий намерены использовать аутсорсинг в ближайшее время или в среднесрочной перспективе. В мире, по данным аналитических агентств, к услугам ИТ-аутсорсинга прибегают свыше 2/3 компаний.

Зарождение предпринимательства в современной России проходило в весьма суровых условиях, когда методы конкурентной борьбы угрожали не только бизнесу, но и жизни и здоровью его собственников. Поэтому первейшей задачей российского бизнеса стала задача экономического и физического выживания.

Таким образом, пионерами аутсорсинга в России стали частные охранные предприятия (ЧОП), позволившие сотням предприятий защитить свой бизнес более качественно и более профессионально, чем несколько штатных охранников. Первые ЧОПы появились в начале 90-х годов, некоторые из них успешно существуют до сих пор, превратившись в достаточно крупные многопрофильные компании, специализирующиеся в сфере обе спечения физиче ской охраны лично сти и объектов, коммерческой безопасности и технической защиты объектов.

Постепенно бизнес становился более цивилизованным, и все большее значение приобретала реклама. Специалистов по рекламе катастрофически не хватало, что создало благоприятную почву для образования специализированных рекламных агентств, способных выполнять сложные проекты. Затраты на привлечение рекламного агентства были не меньше, а во многих случаях больше, чем выполнение работ силами собственного отдела, но это был единственный путь создания качественной рекламы.

Вслед за рекламными агентствами появились PR-агентства и и с с л ед о ват е л ь с к и е ком п а н и и , п р и ч е м е с л и п о с л ед н и е привлекались, как правило, на проектной основе, то многие рекламные и PR-агентства выполняли полный спектр функций соответствующих отделов своих клиентов, фактически замещая эти отделы.

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К началу третьего тысячелетия российский бизнес несколько оправился от дефолта 1998 года, в Россию вернулись многие предприниматели, теперь уже с дипломами MBA, и начался новый этап увлечения современными бизнес-технологиями. Одной из таких технологий являлся отказ от непрофильной для организации деятельности и концентрация усилий на том, что данная компания может делать лучше всех.

Относительно стабильная экономическая ситуация в России поспособствовала появлению новых услуг на рынке аутсорсинга. Основными из них стали ИТ-аутсорсинг, кадровый аутсорсинг и аутсорсинг бухгалтерии.

Большинство российских компаний работает в условиях высокой конкуренции, что требует снижения издержек при сохранении высокого качества предоставляемых услуг. Это порождает новые возможности для аутсорсинговых компаний, среди которых можно отметить:

-Предоставление услуг call-центра;

-Техническая поддержка корпоративных информационных систем;

-Предоставление информационных услуг.

Создание call-центра требует достаточно больших вложений в оборудование, которое используется полный рабочий день только в крупных компаниях. В то же время, многим небольшим компаниям желательно использовать call-центр время от времени для проведения маркетинговых акций или иметь в нем одного-двух постоянных сотрудников для оказания технической поддержки клиентам. В этом случае аутсорсинговый call-центр может предоставить на выгодных условиях как оборудование, так и операторов, выступая, таким образом, еще и в роли аутстаффера.

Техническая поддержка корпоративных информационных систем требует наличия у заказчика высооплачиваемых специалистов, каждому из которых необходимо пройти специальное обучение. Поэтому передача обслуживания системы сторонней организации позволяет не только снизить затраты, но и избежать дополнительных расходов на обучение нового сотрудника в случае увольнения специалиста по поддержке.

Предоставления информационных услуг, в частности таких, как мониторинг СМИ или мониторинг деятельности конкурентов, все чаще отдается сторонним исполнителям. Это позволяет заказчику рационально использовать финансовые ресурсы, а

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исполнителю, работающему с несколькими заказчиками, иметь доступ к новейшим информационным технологиям.

В с е э т и во зм ож н о с т и уже и с п ол ь зу ют с я и буд у т использоваться в будущем еще чаще. Логично предположить, что список услуг, предоставляемых аутсорсинговыми компаниями, будет только расширяться, что создаст новые возможности для взаимовыгодного сотрудничества.

Автор Сергей Зацепа, «Бизнес-журнал»

Exercise 7

Translate the following into Russian.

To fluctuate, to adjust interest rates, core inflation, wage costs, to surge, payrolls, job placement, seniority-based wages, to stifle economic growth, savings rate, to buoy consumption, outsourcing.

UNIT VIII

CURRENCY, BANKS AND MONETARY POLICY

Too Much Money

A global savings glut is good for growth – but risks are mounting

Savings. It’s an almost mystical word for economists – the Holy Grail of growth. The more the country saves, the more it has available to invest. And the more it invests – in computers, factories, or infrastructure – the more productive its economy becomes and the faster it can grow.

From this perspective, most economists have judged the U.S. and found it wanting. With American households putting away only 0.9% of their income in savings and with politicians apparently helpless to eliminate the federal budget deficit, the U.S. seemed to be setting itself up for years of rising interest rates, subpar investment, and sluggish economic growth.

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But that’s not what is happening. Long-term interest rates are falling and have now dipped below 4%. The total of residential and business investment has been rising and now stands at 16.5% of gross domestic product, well above the average for the 1990s. And there are few signs that the economy is stalling.

These surprising events are forcing economists, investors, and policymakers to think more globally than ever before. In just the past few months, they’ve begun to consider seriously two intertwined and heretical notions: What really matters for interest rates is the global economy, and there the problem may be too much savings, rather than too little.

Look around the world, and extra money is piling up in all sorts of places. Japanese corporations are recording record profits, but not doing much spending. Chinese companies are on an investment tear, but the country is getting so much money from exports that it has billions to spare. The surge in oil prices – now about $60 a barrel – is giving oilproducing countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia far more money than they can use right away. And the aging workers of Europe are building nest eggs for an uncertain future.

The International Monetary Fund predicts that in 2005 the worldwide savings rate should hit its highest level in at least two decades. Surprisingly, even in the profligate U.S., businesses have been accumulating huge sums as undistributed corporate profits – running at a record annual rate of $542 billion in the first quarter – have almost doubled in the past two years. This corporate hoarding explains why the U.S. national savings rate, which includes governments and businesses as well as households, rose to 14.7% of national income in the first quarter, up from 12.8% two years ago.

This unexpected surge of savings is like a rose with thorns. Low interest rates have the potential to power productivity, build wealth, and raise living standards throughout the world. As more and more workers in developing countries join the global economy, cheap money makes it easier to provide the equipment and infrastructure they need to prosper. Access to global savings has also enabled the U.S. private and public sectors to fund a big increase in housing construction and health-care spending in recent years, while simultaneously ramping up military outlays. The result: guns and butter – all without boosting inflation or pushing up interest rates.

But the savings glut is creating new risks for the global economy, which is having a tough time absorbing the unanticipated flood of funds.

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