《英语国家社会与文化入门》上册第五单元.docVIP

The UK Economy Text The United Kingdom of Great Britain is a major developed capitalist country. It is now the world’s sixth largest economy and has a gross domestic product（GDPof US$2645 billion (2010) and is forecast to have the strongest business environment of all major European economies, but also a member of the World Trade Organization. It is a leading global nation, as the second largest exporter and third largest importer of commercial services, and the tenth largest exporter and sixth largest importer of merchandise (2007). Absolute Decline and Relative Decline By the 1880s the British economy was dominant in the world, producing one third of the world’s manufactured goods, half its coal and iron, half its cotton. The amount of British shipping was greater than that in the rest of the word put together. But even by 1990 this was no longer the case, the UK having been overtaken by both the United States and Germany; and certainly from1945 until the present, the story of the UK economy is usually thought of as one of decline. This is understandable but rather misleading, as it has in fact been a period of steady economic growth and rapidly increasing living standards. Britain remains one of the Group of Seven large industrial economies. But there are reasons for describing this period as one of decline. Britain entered the post-war world as one of the successful allies of the Second World War, with some of its chief competitor nations such as Germany and Japan, economically destroyed. Also Britain was the centre of a still vast empire. According to the figures, The UK was second only to the United States in the international economy. Thus Britain was then in an apparently strong economic position, a position it clearly no longer occupies, which indicates some sort of decline. But the basic positive-seeming facts describing the size of the economy, the high proportion of the world trade that was British, and so on, in 1945, did not reveal important