国际经贸高级英语精读1--3课课文翻译.doc

Starting as low-income economies in the 1960s, a few economies in East Asia managed,in a few decades, to bridge all or nearly all of the income gap that separated them from the high-income economies of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).Meanwhile many other developing economies stagnated .????????What made the difference?One way to grow is by developing hitherto unexploited land.Another is to accumulate physical capital:roads, factories, telephone networks.A third is to expand the labor force and increase its education and training.But Hong Kong (China) and Singapore had almost no land.They did invest heavily in physical capital and in educating their populations,but so did many other economies.During the 1960s through the 1980s the Soviet Union accumulated more capital as a share of its gross domestic product (GDP) than did Hong Kong (China), the Republic of Korea, Singapore, or Taiwan (China).And it increased the education of its population in no trivial measure. Yet the Soviets generated far smaller increases in living standards during that period than did these four East Asian economies.????????Perhaps the difference was that the East Asian economies did not build, work, and grow harder so much as they built, worked, and grew smarter.Could knowledge, then, have been behind East Asia’s surge ?If so, the implications are enormous,for that would mean that knowledge is the key to development—that knowledge is development.????????How important was knowledge for East Asia’s growth spurt ?This turned out not to be an easy question to answer.The many varieties of knowledge combine with its limited marketability to present a formidable challenge to anyone seeking to evaluate the effect of knowledge on economic growth.????????How, after all, does one put a price tag on and add up the various types of knowledge?What common denominator lets us sum the knowledge that firms use in their production processes; the knowledge that policymaking i