International trade

LEAD-IN

1 Consider the objects surrounding you (classroom equipment, clothes, etc.) and the shopping you’ve done over the last few days. Mention some items that were imported.

2 Read the text below about the primacy of trade. Some of the lines are correct, but some have a word that should not be there. Study each line carefully and decide which words are unnecessary. There is an example at the beginning, (0) and (00).

(0) the

(00) CORRECT

The primal urge

(0) The evidence from anthropology suggests that the trade is one of the oldest

(00) human traits, inherent in our nature in the same way that language is.

(1) Like a language, trade is also a hallmark of our species. The Yir Yoront

(2) aborigines live at the mouth of the Coleman River on the York Peninsula in

(3) northern Australia. Until the last century, they were living in the Stone Age.

(4) They possessed no such items made of metal. They were also true hunter-

(5) gatherers, who lived by hunting game, catching fish and gathering some vegetable

(6) food in the forest. They had no crops and only the one domesticated animal, the

(7) dog. They lived under no system of any government and answered to nothing that

(8) might be called the law. They had, therefore, none of the great inventions to

(9) which we can attribute the origin of our civilisation: no iron, no State, no farming,

(10) no justice, no writing, and no science. Yet they did had one thing we would

(11) consider modern, something so precious as it is probably worth more than all the

(12) others put together, a thing we usually assume cannot never be carried out without

(13) a State, without justice, without writing. That thing was a sophisticated system of trade.

(http://www.on-the-net.com/interskills.minis/econom.html)

3a International trade is one of the indicators showing how well an economic system is working. Think of other economic indicators.

3b Match up the terms (1-15) with the appropriate definitions (a-o).

1) inflation

2) unemployment

3) balance of payment

4) trade gap

5) trade balance

6) trade surplus

7) trade deficit

8) economic output 9) growth rate

10) gross domestic product (GDP)

11) gross national product (GNP)

12) tariffs

13) quotas

14) protectionism

15) dumping

a) the total value of goods produced and services performed in a country or area

b) the difference between the money coming into one country and that going out

c) a system of import duties/tariffs and other controls that protects producers in the home country against competition from foreign producers

d) the total wealth earned or brought into existence in a particular year by a country

e) a rise in the general level of prices caused by an excess of demand over supply and related to an increase in the supply of money

f) a measure of the total of incomes received by residents only for production and services carried out within the country during a particular year

g) the practice of selling a product at a lower price in a foreign country than in the home market

h) a limit placed by a government on the amount of imports or exports of a particular article or commodity

i) when the total value of exports is greater than the total value of imports

j) taxes charged on imports

k) the difference between payments for imports and payments for exports

l) the amount of trade surplus or trade deficit

m) the speed at which a country’s economy grows and gets bigger/the national income of a country increases

n) when the total value of imports is greater than the total value of exports

o) the number of people without a job in a particular area, country, etc.

3c Read the text below and classify the words/expressions describing economic indicators according to the categories in the table below. Then analyse the parts of speech used in these expressions. Pay special attention to the prepositions used with nouns and verbs.

Example: A period of very fast growth followed . September retail sales plummet .

GO UP BE STABLE GO DOWN

very fast growth plummet

- Output, demand and jobs

Japan’s GDP dipped by 0.2% in the fourth quarter, leaving it 0.2% lower than a year earlier. America’s industrial output grew by only 0.1% in February; its 12-month growth slowed to 4.9%. Growth in retail sales slowed to 4.5% in Britain in the year to February; in the year to January sales fell by 2.7% in Germany and 2.0% in Japan.

- Prices and wages

In the year to February consumer-price inflation quickened to 3.4% in Britain and 0.8% in France. British workers’ pay rose by 4.5% in the year to January, a real increase of 1.2%. In the same period, Japanese workers’ wages dropped by 0.5%, a fall of 2.3% after inflation. German workers’ pay rose by 0.8%, a cut of 0.5% in real terms.

- Trade, exchange rates and reserves

In the first quarter, America’s current-account deficit widened to $45.6 billion, increasing the deficit for the year to $166.4 billion, the second largest on record. In 1997 Britain achieved its first annual current-account surplus since 1985. After Britain’s budget, the pound’s trade-weighted value surged to its highest since February 1989.