最新The Economist部分文章全文翻译(持续更新中)

!感-杠-问?

本期杂志推荐11篇泛读，5篇精读。

先贴泛读文章，如下11楼

China and Japan
Could Asia really go to war over these?
The bickering over islands is a serious threat to the region’s peace and prosperity
Sep 22nd 2012 | from the print edition

THE countries of Asia do not exactly see the world in a grain of sand, but they have identified grave threats to the national interest in the tiny outcrops and shoals scattered off their coasts. The summer has seen a succession of maritime disputes involving China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines. This week there were more anti-Japanese riots in cities across China because of a dispute over a group of uninhabited islands known to the Japanese as the Senkakus and to the Chinese as the Diaoyus. Toyota and Honda closed down their factories. Amid heated rhetoric on both sides, one Chinese newspaper has helpfully suggested skipping the pointless diplomacy and moving straight to the main course by serving up Japan with an atom bomb.

That, thank goodness, is grotesque hyperbole: the government in Beijing is belatedly trying to play down the dispute, aware of the economic interests in keeping the peace. Which all sounds very rational, until you consider history—especially the parallel between China’s rise and that of imperial Germany over a century ago. Back then nobody in Europe had an economic interest in conflict; but Germany felt that the world was too slow to accommodate its growing power, and crude, irrational passions like nationalism took hold. China is re-emerging after what it sees as 150 years of humiliation, surrounded by anxious neighbours, many of them allied to America. In that context, disputes about clumps of rock could become as significant as the assassination of an archduke.

One mountain, two tigers

Optimists point out that the latest scuffle is mainly a piece of political theatre—the product of elections in Japan and a leadership transition in China. The Senkakus row has boiled over now because the Japanese government is buying some of the islands from a private Japanese owner. The aim was to keep them out of the mischievous hands of Tokyo’s China-bashing governor, who wanted to buy them himself. China, though, was affronted. It strengthened its own claim and repeatedly sent patrol boats to encroach on Japanese waters. That bolstered the leadership’s image, just before Xi Jinping takes over.

More generally, argue the optimists, Asia is too busy making money to have time for making war. China is now Japan’s biggest trading partner. Chinese tourists flock to Tokyo to snap up bags and designer dresses on display in the shop windows on Omotesando. China is not interested in territorial expansion. Anyway, the Chinese government has enough problems at home: why would it look for trouble abroad?

Asia does indeed have reasons to keep relations good, and this latest squabble will probably die down, just as others have in the past. But each time an island row flares up, attitudes harden and trust erodes. Two years ago, when Japan arrested the skipper of a Chinese fishing boat for ramming a vessel just off the islands, it detected retaliation when China blocked the sale of rare earths essential to Japanese industry.

Growing nationalism in Asia, especially China, aggravates the threat. Whatever the legality of Japan’s claim to the islands, its roots lie in brutal empire-building. The media of all countries play on prejudice that has often been inculcated in schools. Having helped create nationalism and exploited it when it suited them, China’s leaders now face vitriolic criticism if they do not fight their country’s corner. A recent poll suggested that just over half of China’s citizens thought the next few years would see a “military dispute” with Japan.

The islands matter, therefore, less because of fishing, oil or gas than as counters in the high-stakes game for Asia’s future. Every incident, however small, risks setting a precedent. Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines fear that if they make concessions, China will sense weakness and prepare the next demand. China fears that if it fails to press its case, America and others will conclude that they are free to scheme against it.

Co-operation and deterrence

Asia’s inability to deal with the islands raises doubts about how it would cope with a genuine crisis, on the Korean peninsula, say, or across the Strait of Taiwan. China’s growing taste for throwing its weight around feeds deep-seated insecurities about the way it will behave as a dominant power. And the tendency for the slightest tiff to escalate into a full-blown row presents problems for America, which both aims to reassure China that it welcomes its rise, and also uses the threat of military force to guarantee that the Pacific is worthy of the name.

Some of the solutions will take a generation. Asian politicians have to start defanging the nationalist serpents they have nursed; honest textbooks would help a lot. For decades to come, China’s rise will be the main focus of American foreign policy. Barack Obama’s “pivot” towards Asia is a useful start in showing America’s commitment to its allies. But China needs reassuring that, rather than seeking to contain it as Britain did 19th-century Germany, America wants a responsible China to realise its potential as a world power. A crudely political WTO complaint will add to Chinese worries.

Given the tensions over the islands (and Asia’s irreconcilable versions of history), three immediate safeguards are needed. One is to limit the scope for mishaps to escalate into crises. A collision at sea would be less awkward if a code of conduct set out how vessels should behave and what to do after an accident. Governments would find it easier to work together in emergencies if they routinely worked together in regional bodies. Yet, Asia’s many talking shops lack clout because no country has been ready to cede authority to them.

A second safeguard is to rediscover ways to shelve disputes over sovereignty, without prejudice. The incoming President Xi should look at the success of his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who put the “Taiwan issue” to one side. With the Senkakus (which Taiwan also claims), both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping were happy to leave sovereignty to a later generation to decide. That makes even more sense if the islands’ resources are worth something: even state-owned companies would hesitate to put their oil platforms at risk of a military strike. Once sovereignty claims have been shelved, countries can start to share out the resources—or better still, declare the islands and their waters a marine nature reserve.

But not everything can be solved by co-operation, and so the third safeguard is to bolster deterrence. With the Senkakus, America has been unambiguous: although it takes no position on sovereignty, they are administered by Japan and hence fall under its protection. This has enhanced stability, because America will use its diplomatic prestige to stop the dispute escalating and China knows it cannot invade. Mr Obama’s commitment to other Asian islands, however, is unclear.

The role of China is even more central. Its leaders insist that its growing power represents no threat to its neighbours. They also claim to understand history. A century ago in Europe, years of peace and globalisation tempted leaders into thinking that they could afford to play with nationalist fires without the risk of conflagration. After this summer, Mr Xi and his neighbours need to grasp how much damage the islands are in fact causing. Asia needs to escape from a descent into corrosive mistrust. What better way for China to show that it is sincere about its peaceful rise than to take the lead?

from the print edition | Leaders

!感-杠-问?

The future of driving
Seeing the back of the car
In the rich world, people seem to be driving less than they used to
Sep 22nd 2012 | from the print edition

“I’LL love and protect this car until death do us part,” says Toad, a 17-year-old loser whose life is briefly transformed by a super fine” 1958 Chevy Impala in “American Graffiti”. The film follows him, his friends and their vehicles through a late summer night in early 1960s California: cruising the main drag, racing on the back streets and necking in back seats of machines which embody not just speed, prosperity and freedom but also adulthood, status and sex.

The movie was set in an age when owning wheels was a norm deeply desired and newly achievable. Since then car ownership has grown apace. There are now more than 1 billion cars in the world, and the number is likely to roughly double by 2020. They are cheaper, faster, safer and more comfortable than ever before.

Cars are integral to modern life. They account for 70% of all journeys not made on foot in the OECD, which includes most developed countries. In the European Union more than 12m people work in manufacturing and services related to cars and other vehicles, around 6% of the total employed population; the equivalent figure for America is 4.5% of private-sector employment, or 8m jobs. They dominate household economies too: aside from rent or mortgage payments, transport costs are the single biggest weekly outlay, and most of those costs normally come from cars.

Nearly 60m new cars were added to the world’s stock in 2011. People in Asia, Latin America and Africa are buying cars pretty much as fast as they can afford to, and as more can afford to, more will buy.

Til her daddy takes her T-Bird away

But in the rich world the car’s previously inexorable rise is stalling. A growing body of academics cite the possibility that both car ownership and vehicle-kilometres driven may be reaching saturation in developed countries—or even be on the wane, a notion known as “peak car”.

Recession and high fuel prices have markedly cut distances driven in many countries since 2008, including America, Britain, France and Sweden. But more profound and longer-run changes underlie recent trends. Most forecasts still predict that when the recovery comes, people will drive as much and in the same way as they ever have. But that may not be true.

As a general trend, car ownership and kilometres travelled have been increasing throughout the rich world since the 1950s. Short-term factors like the 1970s oil-price shock caused temporary dips, but vehicle use soon recovered.

The current fall in car use has doubtless been exacerbated by recession. But it seems to have started before the crisis. A March 2012 study for the Australian government—which has been at the forefront of international efforts to tease out peak-car issues—suggested that 20 countries in the rich world show a “saturating trend” to vehicle-kilometres travelled. After decades when each individual was on average travelling farther every year, growth per person has slowed distinctly, and in many cases stopped altogether.

There are different measures of saturation: total distance driven, distance per driver and total trips made. The statistics are striking on each of these counts even in America, still the most car-mad country in the world. There, total vehicle-kilometres travelled began to plateau in 2004 and fall from 2007; measured per person, growth flatlined sooner, after 2000, and dropped after 2004 before recovering somewhat. The number of trips has fallen, mostly because of a decline in commuting and shopping (of the non-virtual variety).

Britain, another nation that measures such things obsessively, has a similar arc. Kilometres travelled per person were stable or falling through most of the 2000s. Total traffic has not increased for a decade, despite a growing population. For the past 15 years Britons have been making fewer journeys; they now go out in cars only slightly more often than in the 1970s. Pre-recession declines in per-person travel were also recorded in France, Spain, Italy, Australia, New Zealand and Belgium.

Drive me to the junkyard in my Cadillac

Saturation of car ownership over time is one explanation. The current cohort of retirees—Toad from “American Graffiti”, having faked his death in Vietnam, is now 67—is the first in which most people drove. So more retired people drive now than ever before. In Britain 79% of people in their 60s hold licences, which is higher than the figure for the driving-age population as a whole; in America more than 90% of people aged 60-64 can drive, a larger share than for any other cohort. New generations of drivers will replace old ones rather than add to the total number.

Then there is a second trend. All over the rich world, young people are getting their licences later than they used to—in America and also in Britain, Canada, France, Norway, South Korea and Sweden. Even in Germany, car-culture-vulture of Europe, the share of young households without cars increased from 20% to 28% between 1998 and 2008. Unsurprisingly, this goes along with driving less. American youngsters with jobs drive less far and less often than before the recession. 16- to 34-year-olds in American households with incomes over $70,000 increased their public-transport use by 100% from 2001 to 2009, according to the Frontier Group, a think-tank.

Cost is one factor: fuel prices have risen for all; insurance premiums for the young have soared. Youth unemployment has not helped. But there is also the influence of a new kid on the block: the internet. A University of Michigan survey of 15 countries found that in areas where a lot of young people use the internet, fewer than normal have driving licences. A global survey of teen attitudes by TNS, a consultancy, found that young people increasingly view cars as appliances not aspirations, and say that social media give them the access to their world that would once have been associated with cars. KCR, a research firm, has found that in America far more 18- to 34-year-olds than any other age group say socialising online is a substitute for some car trips.

Young people move around more and settle down later; they would rather travel to far-off lands than cruise the strip downtown. Fleura Bardhi of Northeastern University in Boston interviewed users of car-sharing schemes, much more popular among the young than their elders, and likened the youngsters’ attitudes to cars to their attitude to dating: “People get to try out different cars, different lifestyles, different identities.” By contrast owning a car, they said, felt like being tied down—like a marriage.

In Arthur Miller’s 1949 play “Death of a Salesman”, Happy’s dream was a simple one: “My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women.” Subsequent generations of young men and, perhaps to a lesser extent, young women agreed. But things seem to be changing. The buzz, status and implicit sexuality of car ownership has been taken up, even displaced, by other products and lifestyles, and not just among the young. Tom Worsley, formerly of Britain’s Department for Transport, says that, even for oldies, “It has become a bit passé to polish your car on a Sunday morning.”

Another technological change means that the car not polished on Sunday may not have been to the shops on Saturday, either. A sixth of Britain’s retail spending now takes place online, according to IMRG, a consultancy, and around a twentieth of America’s, according to the Department of Commerce; everywhere the trend is rising. In Britain trips to the shops have been the category of car use that has dropped off most steeply since 1995.

Shut down strangers and hot-rod angels

Older people retaining their licences may swell the ranks of drivers for a while yet, but eventually young people postponing the use or purchase of cars could reduce them. The total number of people with cars may thus drop. And more people owning cars—rather than longer journeys—has been the prime driver of traffic growth in the past. If ownership stabilises or declines, traffic may do so too.

Even without changing absolute numbers, however, age can still play a role in patterns of use. Though more older people drive than used to, per person they also tend to drive less. And so, if people keep getting their licences later, may everyone else. The later people pass their test, the less far they drive even once they can, according to Gordon Stokes of Oxford University. He says people in Britain who learn in their late 20s drive 30% less than those who learn a decade earlier.

Geography matters too. In most rich countries car use has been stable or increasing in rural areas, where driving still offers freedom and convenience. It is in cities, especially their centres, that car ownership and use is declining. And city living is on the rise: the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, expects that by 2050, 86% of the rich world’s population will live in urban areas, up from 77% in 2010.

In America the share of metropolitan residents without a car has grown since the mid-1990s: 13% of people in cities of more than 3m people have no car while only 6% in rural areas live without one. In London car ownership has been falling since 1990, with a plateau from 1995 to 2005; the percentage of households without cars has been growing since 1992. In other British cities the proportion of carless households has been growing since 2005. Car use has fallen in many European cities.

There are various reasons for this. Public mass-transit systems are, in the main, faster and more reliable than they used to be, with increased capacity in many cities. This partly reflects increased investment, particularly in rail. For the past 15 years road and rail investment has been about 1% of GDP for OECD countries, but rail’s share of that has increased from 15% to 23%, says the International Transport Forum.

More recently, private alternatives to car ownership, notably car clubs, have been spreading across North America and northern Europe. By some estimates one rental car can take the place of 15 owned vehicles. Zipcar, which is the biggest international car-share scheme, has 700,000 members and over 9,000 vehicles. Buzzcar, a French company set up by the Zipcar founder, has 605,000 members sharing 9,000 cars.

Perhaps most basic, though, is that in terms of urban living the car has become a victim of its own success. In 1994 the physicist Cesare Marchetti argued that people budget an average travel time of around one hour getting to work; they are unwilling to spend more. For decades cars allowed this budget to go farther. But as suburbs grow and congestion increases most cities eventually hit a “sprawl wall” of too-long commutes beyond which they will not spread far. After that, it appears, a significant number of people start to move back towards the city centre. In America, where over 50% of the population lives in suburbs, more than half the nation’s 51 largest cities are seeing more growth in the core than outside it, according to William Frey at the Brookings Institution.

If car use has peaked, what are the implications? One is that vehicle-makers, which are already having a tough time, will not easily find new markets in the rich world. In America available cars already outnumber licensed drivers. “We are looking at replacement rather than growth in these countries,” says Yves van der Straaten of the OICA, an international trade body of car manufacturers.

Some niche and luxury brands are thriving and are likely to keep doing so. But manufacturers know that the developing world is the future—sales in China overtook those in America between 2010 and 2011 and rose by 2.6%; those in Indonesia, a younger market, jumped by 17%.

A more radical response from carmakers could be to say that if buyers are less interested in driving, then cars will require less driving from them. Driverless cars—robot-guided vehicles that leave their occupants free to text, work or sleep—could go on sale within the next decade, and might meet the mood of the moment. They could be safer and a lot less hassle. Flocking together through clever algorithms, they could cut congestion dramatically. They might further strain the already weakening link between driving and identity and the sense of driving as an expression of self and skill. But they could still be a highly profitable innovation.

Take the highway that’s the best

Even if they are not faced by an invasion of robo-taxis, governments may find that changes in driving habits force them to rethink infrastructure. Most forecasting models that governments employ assume that driving will continue to increase indefinitely. Urban planning, in particular, has for half a century focused on cars.

America built 64,000 kilometres (40,000 miles) of interstate highway to get the country moving after the second world war; since 1980 it has built more than 35,000 new lane-kilometres a year. If policymakers are confident that car use is waning they can focus on improving lives and infrastructure in areas already blighted by traffic rather than catering for future growth. That is already happening in London, where cars pay to enter the centre and ever more space is dedicated to buses and cycles. At Canary Wharf, a business district in east London, 100,000 jobs are supported by only 3,000 parking spaces.

By improving alternatives to driving, city authorities can try to lock in the benefits of declining car use. Cars take up more space per person than any other form of transport—one lane of a freeway can transport 2,500 people per hour by car, versus 5,000 in a bus and 50,000 in a train, reckon Peter Newman and Rob Salter of Curtin University in Australia.

Other assumptions may also need revising. Governments throughout the rich world rely on tax from fuel; across the EU, transport fuel taxes account for 1.4% of GDP, and the figure is a good bit higher in some countries. Revenues are already falling because of efficient cars. They could plummet further if car use keeps dropping.

Cities that bank on parking fees, fines and road tolls may have to find other ways to balance the books. Plans for attracting private investment in roads may need reconsidering. In March 2012 David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, called for private investment in the road network to increase capacity. Such schemes may be viable—but not if based on a payment model that assumes ever-increasing use.

Environmentalists, though, should be cheering all the way to the scrapyard. The International Energy Agency in 2009 projected an average annual increase in global transport-energy demand of 1.6% between 2007 and 2030, though this represents a slowing from earlier growth. Past improvements in vehicle efficiency in America have often been negated by increases in the power and weight of cars, leaving fuel economy constant. Road transport accounts for around 23% of polluting carbon emissions in the OECD; an absolute decline in driving could help change that.

The possibility of reaching “peak car” is most evident in the rich world. But emerging-world cities may reach a similar state earlier in their development, reckons David Metz of University College London.

Where the streets have no name

Non-OECD countries have higher levels of vehicle ownership now than OECD countries did at similar income levels. This is because their transport infrastructure has developed faster than it did in richer countries, cars are cheaper in real terms and urbanisation is happening faster.

Since car use is growing so fast—and urban planning lags behind—cities in poorer countries could hit the “sprawl wall” sooner than those in the rich world did, reckons Mr Newman. Space is already at a premium in dense centres such as Jakarta, where the number of cars is growing ten times faster than the roads available for them to roll on.

Some municipalities in the developing world are already planning for less car use, notably by deploying urban rail systems. The Shanghai metro, mostly built since 2000, ferries 8m people a day and covers 80% of the city. Eighteen Indian cities and several Middle Eastern ones are designing urban rail networks.

Roads are far from empty. In many countries traffic levels have continued rising because population growth has compensated for declining distances driven per person. On many roads peak-time congestion will be a problem demography cannot defuse.

But after 50 years of car culture, culture may finally be changing the car. Gone is the nostalgia of “American Graffiti”. “Cosmopolis”, released in 2012, also features a cocky young man deeply involved with his car; but it is a near stationary limousine that constrains and isolates him far more than it enhances his possibilities. “I’m looking for more,” he protests during his endless journey across Manhattan. The world’s once and future car-owners are increasingly inclined to agree.

from the print edition | Briefing

!感-杠-问?

Trade and the campaign
Chasing the anti-China vote
A suspiciously timed dispute
Sep 22nd 2012 | WASHINGTON, DC | from the print edition

THERE was nothing subtle about the American government’s lodging of a trade complaint on September 17th, alleging that China unfairly subsidises car-part exports on the same day that Barack Obama was campaigning in the crucial swing state of Ohio—home to many car-part suppliers. But then subtlety does not win many elections.

The president duly trumpeted the lodging of the complaint with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) at a rally in Cincinnati, Ohio’s third city, declaring that Chinese export subsidies “directly harm” workers across Ohio, Michigan and the Midwest. For his part, Mr Obama’s Republican rival, Mitt Romney, called the move too little, too late and repeated his charge that Mr Obama had failed to protect American jobs by allowing China to “cheat” by holding down the value of its currency, making its exports cheap. Already, however, the Obama campaign had released television advertisements denouncing Mr Romney for a business career during which he invested in companies active in China, one of which concluded: “Romney’s never stood up to China. All he’s done is send them our jobs.”

China-bashing is a perennial sport at election time. As usual, there is both more and less than meets the eye to this latest outbreak. Both Mr Obama and Mr Romney are keener on free trade than they let on. The dispute over Chinese export subsidies is a real one, which America may well win. Yet an ugly populism is also at work.

The American automotive-parts industry—which supplies carmakers with everything from seats and bumpers to axles and electronic devices—is big, with exports of close to $60 billion in 2010. The industry is a major employer, particularly in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee. But it has endured years of gradual decline. In 2001, five of the top ten global firms were American; by 2009 just two made that list. The first years of the credit crunch hit employment especially hard, with the American industry shedding around 200,000 jobs—some 30% of its total—between 2007 and 2009.

Mr Obama’s complaint relates to “export bases” set up in 12 Chinese municipalities. In these areas, America’s complaint alleges, firms were handed $1 billion in government grants, tax breaks, and subsidised loans between 2009 and 2011, on the condition that they exported the car parts they produced.

The complaint has a good chance of being upheld. The WTO has rules against export subsidies for manufactured products, and interprets them broadly. An American win would not come in time for the election, though. Allowing for appeals, a final ruling might take a year or so.

Delays might suit Mr Obama. China lodged its own complaint at the WTO against America on 17th September. Many Chinese goods face “countervailing” duties when they are shipped to America. These measures, applied to paper, steel, tyres and chemicals among others, are designed to offset China’s subsidies. China reckons they go too far. Recent cases suggest China might well win too.

Does a trade war beckon? Probably not. This tit-for-tat of complaints against existing trade barriers may be causing headaches for the WTO’s lawyers, but it is better than the alternative, a fight in which countries put up new barriers. An optimistic view would be that a flurry of WTO disputes would actually reduce protectionism, unclogging trade channels and reassuring the majority of Americans who told the Pew Research Centre’s Global Attitudes Project that their country’s overall trade deficit with China was a “very serious problem”. Intriguingly, the same poll found that supporters of the Republican Party were far keener on confronting China than the supposedly trade-wary Democrats; that may help to explain Mr Romney’s fierce rhetoric.

A full-scale trade war over car parts is also unlikely for another reason. American firms are having growing success shipping auto parts to car-mad China, exporting $1.3 billion-worth in 2010. Good news for the American heartland, in other words. Just don’t expect to hear much about it while there is an election on.

from the print edition | United States

!感-杠-问?

Occupy Wall Street
Afterthoughts
One year on, what has been achieved?
Sep 22nd 2012 | NEW YORK | from the print edition

THE King of Hearts is Larry Summers and the Jokers are Tim Geithner and Alan Greenspan in the “52 Shades of Greed” deck of playing cards handed out to mark the first anniversary of the start of the Occupy Wall Street movement on September 17th. Also available in Zuccotti Park, where the distinctive discussion groups and drumming circle reformed, was the “Occupy Wall Street Songbook”, with old favourites such as “I’m Gonna Occupy” and “We’re Too Big To Fail”. The carnival mood did not extend to the New York Police Department, however, which arrested 185 protesters, mostly in the course of preventing them forming a “People’s Wall” around the New York Stock Exchange.

All this, however, felt more like a reunion than a restart. Even the planned launch of the Occupy Co-operative was postponed, though the Occupy Bank Working Group still hopes to create an alternative provider of financial services for people disaffected with, or neglected by, the existing banking system. This working group, which includes some Wall Street insiders, is one of the more practical outcomes of the protests, along with the Alternative Banking Group and its offshoot, Occupy the SEC, whose contributions to the debate on regulatory reform (including a tome on the Volcker Rule) have been well-received even by some leading regulators.

Todd Gitlin, a professor at Columbia School of Journalism and the author of a new book, “Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street”, has explored why Occupy did not become the sort of mass movement that could deliver legislative and regulatory change. He cites over-democratic decision-making in its General Assembly and a later turn to violence by some members. On the other hand, he argues, it succeeded in transforming America’s national conversation, adding to the Lexicon not just the Twitter meme of #occupy but also the notion that the country has become divided into a wealthy 1% and a not-so-lucky 99%. Without this, argues Mr Gitlin, it would have been far harder for Mitt Romney to be attacked simply for being rich, first by Newt Gingrich and then by Barack Obama. If this attack strategy helps win Mr Obama another term, he may have the Occupy movement to thank.

from the print edition | United States

!感-杠-问?

France’s economy
The performance gap
The French government seems to realise at last that urgent action is needed to restore the country’s competitiveness
Sep 22nd 2012 | AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS | from the print edition

THE end of the early shift, and workers at the Peugeot car factory at Aulnay-sous-Bois, near Paris, are streaming out through the turnstiles. The anger is raw; the disappointment crushing. In July, when the company announced that the plant, which employs 3,000 workers, was to close, President François Hollande loudly branded the decision “unacceptable”. Two months and an official report later, his government has now accepted its fate. “Hollande said that he would look after us,” says Samir Lasri, who has worked on the production line for 12 years: “Now we regret voting for him.”

The decision by Peugeot-PSA, a loss-making carmaker, to shut its factory at Aulnay, the first closure of a French car plant for 20 years, and to shed 8,000 jobs across the country has rocked France. It has become an emblem both of the country’s competitiveness problem and of the new Socialist government’s relative powerlessness, despite its promises, to stop rivate-sector restructuring. Tough as it is for the workers concerned, the planned closure may have had at least one beneficial effect: to jolt the country into recognising that France is losing competitiveness and that the government needs to do something about it.

Over the past 12 years, a competitiveness gap has opened up between France and Germany, its biggest trading partner. This shows both in manufacturing unit-labour costs, which have risen by 28% in France since 2000, but only 8% in Germany, and in France’s declining share of extra-EU exports. A cross-border study of two chemicals firms by Henri Lagarde, a French businessman, points to part of the problem: the German company pays only 17% of its employees’ gross salaries in social charges, next to 38% for its French counterpart. A recent study of competitiveness ranked Germany in sixth place; France came 21st.

During the presidential election campaign earlier this year, competitiveness scarcely featured—either on the right or the left. Once elected, Mr Hollande gave Arnaud Montebourg, who wrote a best-seller calling for “deglobalisation”, a ministerial job designed to stop industrial closures. Mr Montebourg has duly toured the country promising the impossible.

This autumn, however, as factory closures mount, a creeping sense of reality seems to be setting in. Mr Hollande may still be bent on his new 75% top tax rate, yet on other matters the tone has changed. Not only has the Aulnay closure been accepted, but Mr Hollande has talked of “painful” efforts ahead. He warned about €10 billion ($13 billion) of spending cuts, as well as €20 billion of tax increases, in the 2013 budget. Above all, he called for a “reform of the labour market”—traditionally a taboo for the left.

Mr Montebourg may still denounce the “greed of the financial system”, but other ministers, notably Pierre Moscovici, the finance minister, and Michel Sapin, the labour minister, sound more reasonable. “We want to be sensibly pro-business,” says Mr Moscovici. “We are very conscious that our economy won’t perform without our companies.” Advisers recognise that labour costs too much and that the level of public spending—at 56% of GDP the second-highest in the European Union—is a problem for France.

If there is a new mood, it is partly because of the stagnating economy, and partly because business chiefs have been pressing ministers to stop bashing them. France still has plenty of competitive industrial firms. This summer, Mr Hollande spent three hours visiting a research facility near Paris belonging to Valéo, a successful high-tech car-components supplier with €10.9 billion in annual sales.

How far the new realism will translate into bold decisions, however, is another matter. One immediate test will be the 2013 budget, due on September 28th. The French now face the shock of cuts. Mr Moscovici insists that, however difficult, France’s promise to reduce its budget deficit to 3% by 2013 will be respected.

Equally hard will be a test of the new team’s resolve to improve competitiveness. Louis Gallois, a former businessman, is due to produce a report next month. He is likely to argue for a “competitiveness shock”, including the transfer of a chunk of payroll charges to other forms of taxation, such as green taxes or the contribution sociale généralisée (CSG), which is levied on not only the payroll but financial returns, pensions and unemployment benefit.

Most critical of all, Mr Hollande has given union leaders and bosses until December to negotiate labour-market changes. On the table are various options, including making it possible for firms to reduce hours and salaries in a downturn against a guarantee of job security, along the lines introduced by Gerhard Schröder in Germany in 2003. The CFDT union’s incoming leader, Laurent Berger, also accepts the case for more suppleness in the labour market.

All of which is at least encouraging. Yet it is one thing to recognise a problem, and quite another to do something about it. Much will depend on the attitude of union leaders, who do not enjoy a reputation for co-operation and compromise. But in the end, it will come down to Mr Hollande’s resolve. He promises to pass a labour-reform law anyway, even if no deal is reached. His Socialist Party controls power at all levels across France; he is at the start of a five-year term; and his popularity is already dropping fast. If he cannot do what is needed this autumn, it is unlikely that he ever will.

from the print edition | Europe

!感-杠-问?

Charlemagne
SimEurope
Some fantasies for the future of Europe may cause more problems than they resolve
Sep 22nd 2012 | from the print edition

ANYBODY who has played (or watched their children play) life-simulation computer games, such as “SimCity” or “The Sims”, will know how engrossing they can be. Countless hours are spent creating an intricate synthetic world, be it a house or a whole city, inventing characters that speak a nonsense tongue known as Simlish, controlling their actions and sometimes visiting disaster upon them. A similar craze is gripping Brussels: call it SimEurope.

Guido Westerwelle and Radek Sikorski, the foreign ministers of Germany and Poland, have spent much of this year locked away with nine colleagues (almost all boys) engaging in make-believe. This week they revealed the fruits of their “Future of Europe Group”. It is a world that includes an elected European president, a more powerful European foreign minister, a European border police and perhaps even a European army. The British spoilsports were not invited.

Just a few days earlier, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, gave his annual “State of the Union” address and spoke of a future “federation of nation-states”, a notion he has repeated in countless op-ed articles since. Mr Barroso has thus revived the term coined by his predecessor, Jacques Delors, but has not explained what he means by it. He says only that he will present some proposals by 2014.

With his words, Mr Barroso is breaking away from the three other “presidents”—Herman Van Rompuy of the European Council, Mario Draghi of the European Central Bank and Jean-Claude Juncker of the Eurogroup of finance ministers—who are collectively planning a “genuine” economic and monetary union. Having set out the “building blocks” in June, Mr Van Rompuy has now produced an “issues paper” that proposes, among other things, a central euro-zone budget. An interim report may be presented at a summit in October and the final version should be out in December.

In many ways Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, started this craze for make-believe with her calls for a “political union” (including more power for the flawed European Parliament). This is awkward in France, where parties have been deeply divided over Europe since the referendum in 1992 for the Maastricht treaty (approved narrowly) and the one in 2005 for a constitutional treaty (rejected). Yet Pierre Moscovici, the Socialist finance minister, recently uttered the word “federalism”. And François Fillon, the recent conservative prime minister, has proposed a new “pact for Europe” that would include a European finance minister.

All these ideas have their origins in an old game: More Europe. The aim is to avoid cataclysmic war, or domination by one country, by uniting while still pursuing national advantage. Each level of integration becomes more difficult as problems deepen. Players must not only negotiate away more power, but must then sell the new treaties to their reluctant populations.

In SimEurope the people are synthetic, divided into good Europeans and bad nationalists or populists. The baddies can be defeated by More Europe. In the real world things are rather more complicated. There is growing scepticism about the European project. According to recent polls, a majority of Germans think they would be better off without the euro, and many would be rid of the EU too. In France a majority of those who voted for the Maastricht treaty would not do so again. In Spain, though, a majority wants to deepen euro-zone integration.

Eurosceptic and Europhobic parties are claiming substantial chunks of electorates. In the Dutch elections this month centrists may have made a comeback, but often by adopting a tough line on bail-outs for troubled countries. In many places, there is a growing cry for citizens to be consulted directly in a referendum, albeit for different reasons. In Britain, Eurosceptics hope to win a vote to leave the EU whereas in Germany the pro-EU elite wants a referendum to change the constitution to give more powers to Brussels.

Back to reality

By turning an imaginary currency into reality, Europe’s leaders have created a real-world crisis that they must deal with. Returning to the old marks, francs and lire would be more painful than trying to fix the euro. That means some more integration, and giving up the studied ambiguity about the ultimate objective of Europe so that citizens can make a clear choice.

Leaders are at least discussing the right issues. But the problem with many recent ideas is that they obfuscate the essential questions more than they clarify them. Foreign ministers may like the idea of playing with a European army, but it is hardly central to resolving the economic crisis. Similarly Mr Barroso’s federation of nation-states misses the point. He raises the standard of federalism, which is inevitably contentious, without saying how integration is to be reconciled with the nation-state rump that is left.

The euro zone is heading towards the worst of both worlds—nation-states feel violated by Brussels’s ever-expanding controls, even as the European level remains too weak and opaque to have an impact or win popular allegiance. A better approach might be to set aside labels and think of a narrow set of core functions that need to be deeply integrated. A coherent banking union makes sense, as do some joint bonds. Germany rejects mutualisation of debt on the grounds that not even America expects states to guarantee each other’s debt. Yet America has federal bonds, backed by federal taxes, which in turn provide a safe asset for all banks to hold. American states go bankrupt, as do lots of banks. Call it what you want; integration, centralisation, federation, confederation—the objective should be to stabilise the system sufficiently to allow badly managed banks and states to go bust safely.

from the print edition | Europe

!感-杠-问?

Digital diplomacy
Virtual relations
Foreign ministries are getting the hang of social media
Sep 22nd 2012 | BEIRUT | from the print edition

MINUTES after last week’s violent attacks on America’s missions in the Middle East, the country’s embassy in Cairo was already on Twitter. It tweeted an emergency number for American citizens. It criticised Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood for supporting the protests on their Arabic feed. And it thanked fellow tweeters for their condolences on the murder of the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens.

Welcome to the new world of e-diplomacy, also called, more pretentiously, “21st-century-statecraft”. Historically, governments left diplomacy to the cagey and the discreet, who mostly met behind closed doors. Now they are also using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and local social-media services such as China’s microblogging site, Sina Weibo.

Much of this online activity is “public diplomacy”, meaning governments communicating directly with the citizens of another country. But e-diplomacy is an easy and cheap tool for other purposes, too: responding to disasters, gathering information and managing relationships. Some diplomats also use Twitter to communicate among themselves (many don’t read their own e-mail).

Predictably, America is leading the pack. Since Hillary Clinton, the country’s secretary of state, launched her own 21st-century-statecraft programme in 2009, her ministry has spawned 194 Twitter accounts and 200 Facebook pages with millions of “followers” (subscribers). The State Department in effect operates a “global media empire”, in the words of Fergus Hanson, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, DC, and the author of a study of e-diplomacy.

Most other countries lag far behind. About 20 British ambassadors are now on Twitter (perhaps some were inspired by William Hague, the country’s tweeting foreign minister). Russia’s foreign ministry is said to have more than 40 Twitter accounts. Israel has announced it will make more use of e-diplomacy. Even China, which heavily censors social media at home, is interested in using them as a diplomatic tool abroad.

In many countries it is still individuals who push diplomacy online, often for their own ends rather than for government work. Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, and Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, have big followings on Twitter (and a knack for writing punchy messages). In America the most important e-diplomat is President Barack Obama, although he only occasionally writes his own tweets. His audience of nearly 20m followers dwarfs those of Venezuela’s autocratic Hugo Chavez (3.4m) and Russia’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev (1.5m).

Not being plugged in has become a disadvantage for governments, argues Mr Hanson. In 2010, after suspicions that crimes in Melbourne against Indian students were racially motivated, the number of university applications from India fell by half, reducing what is a big source of income for Australia (Indians are the second-largest group of foreigners studying in the country). In April this year, when two Chinese students were beaten up, Kevin Rudd, the country’s former prime minister, got on Sina Weibo to promise to investigate the matter. Everyone calmed down.

Some argue that social media improves diplomatic preparedness. The State Department monitors social media in five languages and flags, for instance, influential figures in a country whom envoys ought to befriend. With such information, diplomats should be more able to predict events and react to them. “Would we have been better prepared for the Arab spring if we had discovered the hashtag #tahrir earlier?” asks Tom Fletcher, the British ambassador (and twiplomat) in Lebanon.

Yet e-diplomacy also has its critics. They say that by pushing social media and internet freedom, America has persuaded many abroad that the network is just another Trojan horse for American imperialism. “The internet is far too valuable to become an agent of Washington’s digital diplomats,” argues Evgeny Morozov, a noted blogger. Others say that social media do not reinvent diplomacy, but merely add to it: world leaders and their minions still have to meet face-to-face.

And with so many tweeting Talleyrands there is always the danger of e-diplomatic incidents. In June, reacting to an article critical of Estonia’s economic policy by Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, the country’s president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, took to Twitter to call him “smug, overbearing and patronising”. Wait for a tweet to start a war.

from the print edition | International

!感-杠-问?

High-tech fashion
Burberry goes digital
A British fashion giant is banking on technology to lure back customers
Sep 22nd 2012 | LONDON | from the print edition

ON SEPTEMBER 17th Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s creative director, sent models shimmering down the catwalk in a luminous array of lace coats and tiny metallic shorts. The event, part of London Fashion Week, was streamed live to Burberry stores and suburban laptops, allowing fashionistas everywhere to snatch a glimpse of the collections that will appear in stores next spring.

But the show comes at a dolorous time for Burberry, which has seen investors flee like models from a chip butty. Sales are slipping. Burberry’s share price slumped by 18% after the company warned that profits would be at the low end of expectations. It is likely to make around £400m ($650m) for 2012-13, a modest rise from last year’s £376m.

Having expanded rapidly in Asia, the brand is feeling a new chill from the east that even its trenchcoats can’t keep out. Some 12% of its sales come from China, which has been its fastest-growing market. But its sales growth in China is falling, from around 30% to something far less dazzling. Analysts blame China’s economic slowdown and a clampdown on businesses there using luxury gifts as sweeteners. Burberry has suffered worse than its rivals. Shares in LVMH, a French luxury-goods giant, have fallen by only 4% over the same period. Hermès, a French fashion house, seems largely unaffected by Asian belt-tightening.

That has raised doubts about Burberry’s strategy. Angela Ahrendts, the firm’s CEO since 2006, wants to harness technology to spread the word about its creations. Critics fret that her obsession with bits and bytes is a distraction from Burberry’s core business of selling luxury clothes in shops where tourists feel comfortable unzipping their wallets.

Under Ms Ahrendts, Burberry looks quite different from the traditional British clothing firm founded in 1856 by Thomas Burberry to sell raincoats. A huge new store in London’s Regent Street, near the tourist hub of Piccadilly, has a 22-foot-high screen, beaming images of the latest collections, with sound pumped out through 500 speakers.

Garments are fitted with interactive screens and RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, which mean that customers can flash clothes in front of interactive screens to see how a handbag detail or raincoat lining is made. More potential buyers are browsing online, then coming into the stores to make their purchase, so it makes sense for the two platforms to have the same stock organised in the same way (an organisational feat that has defeated many retailers).

All this iPaddery is well and good, but some fashionistas fear that it projects too harsh an image. “Louis Vuitton offers them deep-pile carpets. Burberry offers them big computer screens,” quips one London designer.

Ms Ahrendts is undaunted. Far from being too high-tech, she argues, the industry has to keep pace with a generation of shoppers who download images of coveted items rather than tearing pictures out of a magazine. “I’ve seen what has happened to brands like Kodak that did not keep up with digital change,” she says. “That’s a lesson in what to avoid.”

Her most controversial plan is called “Customer 360”. The aim is to entice customers to allow Burberry to record their buying history, shopping preferences and fashion phobias in a digital profile, which can be accessed by sales staff using hand-held tablets. Using it, an assistant can tell what a customer in Brazil last bought on a stopover in Paris—and what they last said about Burberry on Twitter.

“Customer 360” is due to be tested in the new London store next spring. It will mean that Burberry keeps a detailed database on each customer’s spending habits. That could cause embarrassment, for example if a customer who has bought racy gifts for his mistress enters a Burberry store with his wife and is enthusiastically ushered to the skimpy bikinis.

Burberry emphasises that customers will be asked whether they want to opt into the scheme or keep a penchant for chic swimwear private. An earlier idea of using RFID tags to “read” which Burberry clothes customers are wearing when they walk into a store has been postponed after worries that some may find it creepy.

One risk of the relentless focus on high-tech gizmos is that Ms Ahrendts may neglect other things. Some analysts think Burberry’s customers are being moved too swiftly up the “value pyramid”—fashion-speak for being charged so much that they go elsewhere. The London store displays a gold python-skin jacket and a crocodile-skin coat for £75,000. Even the firm’s lower-priced “Burberry Brit” range is pricier than its peers. Ms Ahrendts dismisses such concerns as “superficial”.

If prices are to remain high, then the brand has to keep attracting new generations of well-off luxury-lovers. Jaana Jatyri, an analyst for Trendstop, is optimistic about the future for Thomas Burberry’s heirs. “Luxury customers are now very savvy and quick to make purchasing decisions,” she says. Grabbing their attention digitally may well be the best way to ensure that their next splurge will be on Burberry’s recycled reptiles, rather than on someone else’s.

from the print edition | Business

!感-杠-问?

Free exchange
The reform club
The euro area needs structural reforms but they can cause damage when economies are weak
Sep 22nd 2012 | from the print edition

THROUGHOUT the euro crisis, policymakers have been desperate to buy time so that the therapies prescribed for troubled European economies can be administered. The European Central Bank’s new bond-purchasing strategy has ushered in another period of respite, which with luck will last longer than previous ones. There are two main courses of treatment for peripheral economies. One is austerity, to get public finances under control. The other is structural reform, to boost growth.

Structural reform comes in many guises. It can mean opening up product markets to more competition (Italy is starting to loosen the strict licensing system that has long shielded pharmacists from competition). Or it can involve making labour markets more flexible (Spain is trying to narrow the divide between well-protected permanent staff and lightly protected temporary ones). Such reforms are less controversial than austerity. But are they the right remedy in bad times?

Over the long term, higher productivity growth and better-functioning labour markets are vital if economies in southern Europe are to regain the competitive ground they lost in the first decade of monetary union, when their unit labour costs soared relative to those in northern countries like Germany. Unable to devalue against their euro-zone partners, they must restore competitiveness the hard way, by lowering domestic costs. Structural reforms are worthwhile elsewhere in the euro area, too. The IMF estimates* that eliminating half of the gaps between euro-zone countries and what the OECD considers best practice in the rich world in pensions, labour and product markets, together with tax reform, could raise euro-area output by 4.5% over five years.

That is a lot, given that conventional wisdom holds that reforms take a long time to bear fruit. Change is disruptive: workers and businesses must adjust to new incentives and working practices before the benefits show through. Margaret Thatcher shook up Britain’s sclerotic, union-dominated labour market in the 1980s, but the unemployment rate still exceeded 10% in the recession of the early 1990s. It was only during the subsequent job-rich recovery that the effects of curbs on union power and sharper incentives to work materialised. A German overhaul of its labour market a decade ago has had a swifter impact, but lengthy pay-off periods are commonly held to explain why so many politicians are reluctant to take on vested interests.

The OECD, an inter-governmental think-tank, has investigated big structural reforms in 30 rich economies over the three decades before the crisis. In a working paper published earlier this year, its researchers focused on shake-ups in labour and product markets, as well as tax reforms like reducing the share of direct taxes (on income) in the total tax take. They found that the full pay-off from reform usually took five years to materialise, but that some gains appear sooner.

Take cuts in unemployment benefit, which spur the jobless to find work. A big reduction in benefits typically raised the employment rate by a percentage point over five years, with a fifth of that gain coming in the first year. Dual labour markets, a particular problem in southern Europe, provide another example. Without reform, employers respond to a fall in demand for their products by getting rid of their temporary workers but find it difficult to resist pressure from “insiders” on permanent contracts for higher pay. The OECD study suggests that past initiatives to reduce job protection for regular staff have quickly cut unemployment, especially among women and young people. (Further weakening the position of temporary workers actually hurts employment, both initially and in the long term.) Revenue-neutral tax reforms that shift the burden away from direct taxation also get more women into the workforce quickly as it becomes more advantageous to have a second family income.

The OECD’s research tells a broadly reassuring story about structural reforms. The moral is that governments should just get on and do them. But there is an important proviso: the state of the economy can affect the reforms’ short-run impact. When economies are depressed, sweeping labour-market changes tend to bring down employment rather than raise it. Lowering unemployment benefits may sharpen the incentive to find work but if there is no work available the jobless will simply have less money to spend. Similarly, weakening job-protection measures will make it easier for firms to get rid of excess staff but they will make no offsetting hires.

Sequencing matters

Structural reforms could do with a bit of structuring themselves, in other words. First, when economies are already in dire straits, as in southern Europe, policymakers should focus initially on shaking up product markets, whose efficacy is less sensitive than labour-market reforms to the state of the economy and which can themselves help get more people into work. The OECD’s research finds that promoting competition in network industries such as telecommunications, transport and electricity raises labour-market participation. Second, since product-market reforms typically encourage new firms to enter markets and these firms depend upon the flow of finance, it is vital that banks are lending normally. Finally, if governments do decide to press ahead with reforms across the board, there is a strong case for easing the pace of fiscal retrenchment to give them a fair wind.

Structural reforms work best in good economic times. Because tough measures are, perhaps wrongly, seen as tough politics they are more often introduced in bad times. But better design can help make change more palatable.

* Sources
IMF June 2012, "Fostering Growth in Europe Now", by Bergljot Barkbu et al
OECD 2012, "The short-term effects of structural reforms: an empirical analysis", Working Paper 949, by Romain Bouis et al
OECD 2012, "Going for Growth"
OECD 2012, Survey of euro area

from the print edition | Finance and economics

!感-杠-问?

Geoengineering
Clouds over troubled waters
Fiddling with clouds could help tame hurricanes
Sep 22nd 2012 | from the print edition

WHEN drought threatened them, some groups of Native Americans used to hold rain dances. These colourful rituals, involving turquoise ornaments to represent water and feathers to stand in for the wind, were to urge the gods to send a storm. Now such dances are reserved for tourists—and rain-making has become a science, involving seeding clouds by dropping frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice) or silver iodide into them from aircraft. This works, though it is not widely practised outside China because the benefit is rarely reckoned to exceed the cost. A new study, however, suggests a similar technique might have great benefits indeed, by reducing the devastation caused by a type of weather no one welcomes: hurricanes.

Cloud-seeding works because the substances employed gather molecules of water vapour around themselves to form droplets. With enough such condensation, a cloud can be encouraged to produce more rain than it otherwise would have done. Rather than rain, though, it is the idea of fiddling with clouds’ brightness that interests Alan Gadian of the University of Leeds, in Britain, and his team.

A hurricane forms when intense sunlight heats the surface of the sea, driving both evaporation and convection. As the warm, moist air thus produced rises, it cools. The consequent condensation of the water vapour it is carrying heats the air further (the change of state from gas to liquid sheds latent heat), causing it to continue rising. So the process feeds on itself to generate powerful winds and heavy rainfall.

In most parts of the world the surface of the sea is not warm enough for hurricanes to form. Sometimes that is because of its latitude, but sometimes it is because it is covered by low cloud layers, which reflect sunlight. Roughly 30% of the ocean is so covered. And it was this fact that made Dr Gadian and his colleagues wonder what would happen to hurricanes if that effect were amplified by making the clouds brighter. This should be possible by making seeds that increase the number of water droplets in the clouds.

Instead of using aircraft-borne chemicals as seeds, the researchers propose spraying seawater from unmanned, wind-powered, satellite-controlled vessels that would cruise the latitudes where hurricanes form—since droplets of brine have a similar effect to dry ice and silver iodide. In the absence of a multi-billion-dollar research budget and the necessary permissions, however, their ships have sailed only through the processor of a computer. But the results are still illuminating.

The team report in Atmospheric Science Letters that brightening virtual clouds around the world in this way caused ocean temperature in regions where hurricanes form to drop by as much as 4°C. If that happened in the real world, it would heavily suppress the intensity of these storms. Pulling this trick off, however, required the deployment of 2,000 virtual spray ships, and also interfered with rainfall patterns in a way that would not be appreciated by the world’s farmers.

Such an armada might not, however, be necessary to produce a more modest but still useful effect. Simulating the activities of spray ships in just the three areas of the world with plenty of low-level marine clouds resulted in a temperature decrease of only 0.1°C. Though that did not make the situation any better than it is now, it was enough to stop storms becoming even more powerful as global carbon-dioxide levels rose, and ocean temperatures rose with them.

Such grand-scale geoengineering, as it is known, would not merely be a technical challenge to implement in reality. It would be a political and legal nightmare, too. But even if it remains safely locked away in a computer, it gives pause for thought about the extent to which people might influence the climate with a specific end in view. It would make a change.

from the print edition | Science and technology