Useful terms and expressions

1. capex / capital expense(s) – капитальные расходы/затраты, капиталовложения

TEXT 5

Interpret the article into Russian orally. Give your account of the competition strategies. Comment on the headline and the use of musical metaphors, highlighted in the text:

Money, Money, Money

Musicals are booming

“YOU can’t make a living, but you can make a killing,” goes the Broadway adage. Musicals have odds like venture capital: only one in ten makes money, and two out of ten lose it all. The hits, however, are huge. “Cats” probably made a 3,500% return for its initial investors. Since it debuted in London 27 years ago “The Phantom of the Opera”, a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, has grossed $5.6 billion worldwide, more than any film or television show. Musicals had their first big boom in the 1940s, when Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote “South Pacific” and “Oklahoma!” In the 1980s Mr Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, another Brit, invented the “mega musical”, with big-budget shows such as “Phantom” and Mr Mackintosh’s “Les Misérables”.

Now the business is belting out high notes again, with new shows, new markets and new interest in old hits. Hollywood studios have always licensed rights to their films; now they are trying to produce them on stage. Disney led the way. Universal Pictures struck accidental gold with “Wicked”: the studio had bought the rights to turn the book, about the Wicked Witch of the West, into a film, but was later approached to make it into a musical, which has grossed $3 billion.

Economist

Useful terms and expressions

1. belting out – громко распевать

2. odds – шансы, вероятность, возможности,

TEXT 6

Please interpret the excerpt on COMPETIVENESS. Pay special attention to translation of the active vocabulary units.

Competitiveness.
'Real economists don't talk about competitiveness,' said Paul Krugman, a much-respected contemporary economist and a Nobel Prize winner. Real businessmen and real politicians talk about it all the time, however. Many firmshaveundergone savage downsizing to remain competitive, and governments have set up numerous committees to examine how to sharpen their countries' economic performance. 
Mr Krugman's objection was not to the use of the term ‘competitiveness’ by companies, which often do have competitors that they must beat, but to applying it to countries. At best, it is a meaningless word when applied to national economies; at worst, it encourages protectionism. Countries, he claimed, do not compete in the same way as companies. When two companies compete, one's gain is the other's loss, whereas international trade, Mr Krugman argued, is not a zero-sum game: when two countries compete through trade they both win.

Yet measures of national competitiveness are not complete nonsense. A country's future prosperity depends on its growthin productivity, whichgovernmentpolicies can influence. Countries docompete in that they choose policies to promote higher living standards. Even so, conceptual and measurement difficulties mean that the growing number of indices purporting to compare the competitiveness of different countries should probably be taken with a large pinch of salt.

Economist Dictionary