ترجمۀ اقتصادی - متن ۴

ترجمۀ اقتصادی – متن ۴

در یافتنِ معادل‌ اقتصادیِ عبارت‌های آبی‌رنگ دقّت بفرمایـید.

CORPORATE TAX RATES

American politicians talk a lot about tax reform but do nothing about it, which is a pity, because while Americans have been talking, other countries have been doing. Since the late 1980s, top corporate tax rates around the world have dropped so far that America’s, which was once below the international average, is now well above.

As this has happened, American-based multinational companies have shifted more activity offshore; their foreign employment has steadily risen over the past decade as domestic employment has declined. This is mostly because of the appeal of cheap labour and growing markets in the emerging world, but business groups and many economists think America’s tax rate is also to blame. Liberal analysts blame the tax code for a different reason: it allows multinationals to stash income in foreign havens and indefinitely defer taxes on it, encouraging the outsourcing of jobs.

Barack Obama claims to be ready to do something about it. Calling the present tax code “outdated, unfair, and inefficient”, he proposed on February 22^nd to lower the top corporate rate to 28% from 35% (including state and local taxes, it would fall to 32.6% from 39.2%). Previous analysis suggests that such a cut would cost more than $700 billion, or 0.4% of GDP, over the next decade. Mr Obama would add to the price tag by making permanent a variety of tax provisions, such as the credit for research and development, which are likely to cost $250 billion over the next decade.

Mr Obama, however, pledged that he would pay for these provisions by eliminating enough tax breaks to ensure that the overall plan would not add to the deficit. But deciding whose tax breaks will go is what makes tax reform hard. Mr Obama has called again, as his budgets repeatedly have, for eradicating a dog’s dinner of loopholes covering inventory accounting, oil and gas production, corporate life-insurance policies, and hedge-fund profits. He would impose a minimum tax rate on foreign-source income. But this still leaves a lot of money to be raised through other means. There Mr Obama, sadly but understandably, grows vague: curbing depreciation, the deductibility of interest, and the use of business forms such as partnerships and limited-liability companies (LLCs) should all, he says, be “considered”.

ترجمۀ سیاسی - متن ۴

ترجمۀ سیاسی – متن ۴

CAIRO — Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi rebuilt his cabinet Sunday, replacing 10 ministers and amplifying the Islamist presence in the government. The move, in which at least three Islamists were appointed to head major economic ministries, comes a day ahead of a planned visit by a top International Monetary Fund official to discuss an impending $4.8 billion loan.

The shake-up also marked the latest in a series of appointments and forced resignations that have rattled Egypt’s government in the two years of political turmoil since a popular uprising ousted President Hosni Mubarak. Morsi, as well as the transitional leaders who ruled before his June election, have used cabinet shuffles as a means to assuage popular frustration at the slow pace of economic and political reforms.

Islamist political parties gave their support to the latest move, but some opposition members criticized it, saying it served only to further consolidate Islamist control of top government positions weeks after a conflict over the religious character of Egypt’s new constitution left the country bitterly divided.

Mohamed Adel, a leader in the April 6th youth opposition movement, said in a statement Sunday that Morsi’s administration had not consulted opposition parties on the move and that the Muslim Brotherhood would bear responsibility for any bad policies to come. Morsi is a former leader of the powerful Islamist organization.

At least three of the new ministers are long-serving members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including those heading the ministries of supply and domestic trade, and local development. The new finance minister, Al-Mursi al-Sayed Hegazy, is not a member of the Islamist organization, but local media described him as a specialist in Islamic banking who may be sympathetic to the group.

Many of the Brotherhood’s allies from the more-conservative Salafist parties have called on the government to implement a system of Islamic banking, which would ban interest on loans, as an alternative mechanism for economic reform.

ترجمۀ اقتصادی - متن ۳

ترجمۀ اقتصادی - متن ۳

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Rating agency Moody's warned it may cut the triple-A ratings of France, Britain and Austria and it downgraded six other European nations including Italy, Spain and Portugal, citing growing risks from Europe's debt crisis.

Moody's move was less aggressive than rival agency Standard & Poor's, but its action puts London's prized top credit rating in jeopardy for the first time.

It said it was worried about Europe's ability to undertake the reforms needed to address the crisis and the amount of funds available to fight it. It also said the region's weak economy could undermine austerity drives by governments to fix their finances.

The euro and sterling fell after the announcement, with pound falling 0.4 percent to $1.5703 and the single currency dipping 0.3 percent to $1.3154. European and U.S. equity index futures were also lower.

The U.S. rating agency said it changed the outlooks for the ratings of France, Britain, and Austria to negative due to "a number of specific credit pressures that would exacerbate the susceptibility of these sovereigns' balance sheets."

Germany's top-tier rating was described as "appropriate" by Moody's, and it affirmed the triple-A rating on the euro zone's bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF).

Moody's, which said late last year it was reconsidering its European ratings, cut the ratings of Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Malta by one notch. It downgraded Spain by two notches.

Moody's said the scope of the downgrades was limited due to "the European authorities' commitment to preserving the monetary union and implementing whatever reforms are needed to restore market confidence."

The announcement came a day after Greece's parliament approved a deep new round of budget cuts in the hope of securing new bailout funds and avoiding a default in March.

ترجمۀ سیاسی - متن ۳

ترجمۀ سیاسی - متن ۳

Arms Control: Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

An international agreement to prohibit diffusion of nuclear weapons among non-nuclear states. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was hammered out during four years of intensive negotiations in the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC) and in the General Assembly's Political and Security Committee, leading to approval of the draft treaty by the assembly in June 1968. Under the terms of the treaty, each nuclear-weapon State agrees “not to transfer... assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons”.

Each non-nuclear State agrees “not to receive... manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons”. The eleven-article treaty took effect after its ratification by three nuclear powers (Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States) and by forty non-nuclear countries. Today, most nations are signatories to the treaty and accept its terms as a limitation on their freedom of action in the nuclear weapons field. To counter the threat of future “nuclear blackmail”, the three nuclear powers offered in a Security Council action to provide “immediate assistance, in accordance with the Charter, to any non-nuclear-weapon” State that is the victim of an act or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.

ترجمۀ سیاسی- متن ۲

ترجمۀ سیاسی- متن ۲

Cameron Plays Down Prospect of In-Out EU Vote

British Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday played down the prospect of a referendum any time soon on whether Britain should leave the European Union, defying calls from within his Conservative Party and the public.

Cameron is expected to explain how he wants to change Britain’s relationship with the EU next week, in a speech that could set a course for leaving the 27-member bloc, deepen fractures within his own party, and strain ties with its Liberal Democrat coalition partners.

A weekend poll by the influential website ConservativeHome found that 78 percent of Conservative Party members either want Britain’s relationship with the EU reduced to access to its common market or to leave the bloc altogether.

“If we had an in-out referendum tomorrow, or very shortly, I don’t think that would be the right answer for the simple reason that I think we would be giving people a false choice,” Cameron told BBC radio.

Conservative infighting over Europe helped topple previous party leaders, and splits on the issue appear to be deepening as Cameron’s speech nears. Media reports say he will speak on January 22 or 23 in Germany or in the Netherlands. Cameron’s office declined to confirm the reports.

Eric Pickles, a Conservative, said on Sunday he hoped it was in Britain’s interest to stay in the EU, but “we shouldn’t stay at any price”.

On the other side of the debate, Conservative Party grandee Michael Heseltine said on Saturday Cameron’s plan to change Britain’s relationship with the EU was an “unnecessary gamble”, and put the country’s status as a business destination at risk.

The Lib Dems, the Conservatives’ junior partners in coalition rule, are pro-Europe, and divisions over the issue threaten to put renewed strain on the partnership.

Cameron says he wants Britain to remain in the EU – a major trading partner – but is under pressure from an increasingly Eurosceptic public to repatriate powers from Brussels or leave the bloc altogether.

The anti-Europe UK Independence Party has surged in popularity in the last year, wooing Conservative voters and threatening to split the right-wing vote ahead of a 2015 general election.

ترجمۀ اقتصادی - متن ۲

ترجمۀ اقتصادی - متن ۲

We have seen that if there is too low a level of demand in an economy, the result is unemployment: during the 1920s and 1930s there was too little demand in Britain, and the consequence was prolonged unemployment. But what happens if there is too much demand in an economy? What is the opposite of unemployment? Naturally enough, Keynes did not devote a great deal of the General Theory to this question, but nevertheless he did answer it quite clearly. What one means by saying that there is too much demand in the economy is, to put it rather loosely, that the economy is already going flat out, with full employment of men and machinery, so that output is at its highest possible level—and that there is then an increase in demand. This increase in demand cannot call forth more output. All it can do is one of two things; either it can pull up the price of the goods and services that are already being produced—the consequence of a larger amount of money being spent on the same amount of staff. Or, in an economy with trades with other countries, it can increase, the quantity of goods available—but only by sucking in more imports and diverting to the home market goods that otherwise have been exported. In practice, an excessive level of demand will probably result in some of each; there will be some rise in prices, and imports will be higher, and exports lower than they would otherwise have been.

Now anyone who has lived in post-war Britain in even moderate possession of his faculties will observe that there is something familiar about this: rising prices, too low a level of exports, too high a level of imports; surely these are at the heart of our post-war economic problems. If Keynes’s analysis showed us how to prevent unemployment by ensuring that there is enough demand in the economy, why has it not also shown us how to prevent rising prices and balance of payments crises by avoiding too much demand?