(word)考研英语阅读例题： From hoarding to hiring 从留住员工到招兵买马.docVIP

From hoarding to hiring 从留住员工到招兵买马[2010.10.07] The Economist Even as Americans are beginning to fear that their labour market is turning European, Europeans still feel under pressure to turn Anglo-Saxon. The American labour market may be less dynamic than it was, but it is still more dynamic than Europe’s. America’s exit rate from unemployment, at 24% a month, is still far faster than rates in recent decades in France 8% , Germany 6% and Italy 4% . Many European countries fail to make the most of their working-age population, even as that population is poised to shrink. In Germany it has already contracted by 2.2% over the past decade. Countries with an unfavourable demography grow more slowly not only because fewer people work but also because they save and invest less. Governments are not entirely powerless to deal with the effects of demographic trends. They can raise the retirement age, open the doors to immigration and tempt more people into the labour force. Japan, for instance, is greying faster than Europe, but its employment rates are better than America’s. In Denmark the working-age population is already shrinking, but a larger proportion of this smaller population is actually working. Indeed, a number of European countries have changed far more than many especially Americans give them credit for. In a forthcoming report the MGI heralds the “unsung” progress in European labour markets. Despite a far smaller growth in their population, the 15 west European member states of the EU created more jobs than America between 1995 and 2008. They countered their adverse demography by reducing their jobless rates and boosting participation in the labour market. For example, the share of working-age women in the labour force rose by 11 percentage points between 1990 and 2010. The EU-15 still get less work out of their population than America does 733 hours per person per year against America’s 913 . But the gap is closing. To narrow it further, Euro