Unit 25.

Efficiency and Employment

Listening 1: Efficiency and the number of employees.
Listen to Anna-Kim Hyun-Seung, talking about alternatives to laying off employees,and
answer the questions.
1. What do companies normally do when they increase their efficiency? They just
want to lower the number of employees.
2. What is the alternative that Anna-Kim Hyun-Seung mentions? That instead of
going for lay-offs,instead of reducing the number of empoyees,they actually
decided to reduced the average number of working hours per employee.
3. What were the consequences for the employees in the case mentioned?
Employees can invest their time in training,development,education.
Listening 2: Efficiency,training and productivity
Listen to Anna-Kim talking about a Korean company,and answer the questions.
1. What do Yuhan-Kimberly do? They make toilet paper tissues,and sanitary tems.
2. Why do they have a good reputation? Because of their very consistent corporate
social responsability plices and practice.
3. What was the companys solution to the problem they faced? They cut down the
number of average working instead of cutting down the number of employees.
4. What were the consequences? After this change,there was a big increase in
productivity.
Comprehension:
1. What does the post office want to do? The post office wants to reduce the
number of sorting offices from the existing spread all over the country to three.
2. Why do they say this is necessary? The restructuring would sabe 200 million a
year in salaries and increased efficiency.
3. What are the advantages and disadvantages? The number of sorting staff would
be reduced from 10,000 to about 5, 500, although many of them would now have
to work at night and would have to trave further to work.
4. Who is for and who is against the plan? The trade unions are obviously against
this proposal ,and so are the local governments in areas where many jobs would
be lost. On the contrary,the local governments in the areas where the three new
centres are planned are wholly in favour of the project.

Unit 26. Exchange Rates.

Comprehension:
Write questions to which these could be the answers,according to the text.
1. A system in which the Federal Reserve could Exchange gold for all the paper
Money,if necessary. What is Gold convertibility?
2. Because of inflation .Why a currency depreciates?
3. By the number of buyers and sellers. What determines the exchange rates?
4. The cost of a given selection of goods and services would be the same. What is
Parity and Speculation?
5. To get a higher interest rate or make a capital gain. Why Financial
Institutions,companies and rich individuals all buy currencies?
6. About 95%.What percentage is purely speculative?
7. By buying futures contracts. How is possible to some extent to hedge against
currency fluctuations?
8. By buying or seling their currency on the exchange markets . What does the
Governments and Central Banks to try to change the value of their currency?
9. Because speculators have much more money than governnments. Why
speculators attempts to manage a floating exchange rate?

Listening 1: Currency flows and the Tobin Tax

Listening to Michael Kitson,talking about a posible way of limiting currency
speculation,and answer the questions.
1. What is hot money? That money is flowing instantaneously backwards and
forwards.
2. What are the real effectsof financial crises that Kitson mentions? People lose
jobs,unemployment goes up,and output falls.
3. What is a Tobin Tax? Is an argument that you tax,at a very small rate,very small
tax on currency purchase and currency selling.
4. What is highly leveraged currency trading? Borrow a lot of Money to buy a
currency or sell a currency.
5. What would be the probable effect of the Tobin Tax? May dampen down the
currency speculation over time.
6. What has happened that makes some people think a Tobin Tax could now be
introduced? The world economys developed,as exchange rates have suffered
from crises,increasingly people are thinking its back to the agenda.

Listening 2: Developing Africa

Listen to Michael Kitson talking about how the Tobin Tax could be spent,and answer the
questions.
1. Why dont individual firms invest a lot of Money in Africa? Because they wont get
what they call a private rate of return,they will not make profit from it.
2. What would be the benefits of spending the Money generated by the Tobin Tax
in Africa? A significant social rate of return,better education,better economy
growth,better standars of living,people living longer.

Unit 27. International Trade

Listening 1: Free Trade
Listen to Michael Kitson talking about the consequences of free trade,and answer the
questions.
1. What are the problems with economic models? Sometimes those models are not
useful in explanining the way the real world works, or sometimes there are
exceptions to those models.
2. What is the standard argument for free trade? Is when everybody gets better
off,more efficiency,we can consume more goods and services.
3. What is the example Kitson gives? Two differents economies with two goods.A
developed country and underdeveloped country.Producing cloth and computers.
4. Who loses in this example,and why? The country with free trade that is not
specialize in what their are best at. So,the people will lose their jobs .
5. What is Kitsons suggested alternative to unfettered free trade? He said that if
people have concerned about those people,they may want to have some transition
process and may be concerned about unfettered free trade.