接上文：
《經(jīng)濟學人》精讀28：India’s missing middle class（part 1）
《經(jīng)濟學人》精讀29：India’s missing middle class（part 2）
The rich get richer
Some have doubts about Mr Piketty’s methodology. But other surveys suggest pretty similar distribution patterns.Looking at wealth as opposed to income, Credit Suisse established in 2015 that only 25.5m Indians had a net worth over $13,700, equating roughly to $50,000 in America. And two-thirds of that cohort’s wealth was held by just 1.5m upper-class savers with at least $137,000 in net assets.
India’s middle class may be far from wealthy but the rich are truly rich. There are over 200,000 millionaires in India. Forbes counts 101 billionaires and adds one more to the list roughly every two months. It shows. The Hermès shop next door to the Honda dealership frequented by Mr Srinath sells scarves and handbags that cost far more than his scooter.?Flats in posh developments?start at $1m. In other emerging economies,?there are fewer very rich and a wider base of potential spenders for marketers to tap.
印度的富人是真的非常富，有超過二十萬百萬富翁蕴轨。 福布斯榜上有101位億萬富豪港谊，每兩個月就會新增一位。?
其他經(jīng)濟正在起飛的國家中尺棋，會比較少超級富豪封锉，但會有更多的有能力的消費者（貧富差距沒那么大）
In absolute terms, India has wealth roughly comparable to Switzerland (population 8m) or South Korea (51m).Although India’s population is almost the size of China’s, it is central Europe, with a population about the size of India’s top 10% and boasting roughly the same spending power, that is a better comparison. Global companies pay attention to markets the size of Switzerland or central Europe. But they do not look to them to redefine their fortunes.
Confronted by this analysis, India bulls?concede?the middle class is comparatively small, but insist that?bumper growth is coming. The assumptions behind that, though, are not convincing. For a start, the growth of the overall economy is good—the annual rate is currently 6.3%—but not great. From 2002 China grew at above 8% for 27 quarters in a row. Only three of the past 26 quarters have seen India growing at that sort of pace.
concede: to say that you accept or do not deny the truth or existence of something: to admit something usually in an unwilling way
bull: a person who tries to make money by buying stocks and selling them after their price has gone up: a person who expects the price of stocks to go up
在數(shù)據(jù)分析面前，那些炒股的就承認印度中產(chǎn)人數(shù)確實少膘螟，但預測很快就會有爆發(fā)性增長成福，這種立場也是站不住腳的，印度經(jīng)濟年增長也就6.3%
Another assumption is that past patterns will no longer hold and that the spoils of growth will be distributed to a class earning decent wages and not to the very rich or the very poor. Yet?the sorts of job that have conventionally provided middle-class incomes are drying up.Goldman Sachs, another bank, estimates that at most 27m households make over $11,000 a year—just 2% of the population. Of those, 10m are government employees and managers at state-owned firms, where jobs have been disappearing at the rate of about 100,000 a year since 2000, in part as those state-owned enterprises lose ground to private rivals.
The remaining 17m are white-collar professionals, a lot of whom work in the information-technology sector, which is?retrenching?amid technological upheaval and threats of protectionism. In general, salaries at large companies have been?stagnant?for years and recruitment is dropping, according to CLSA, a brokerage.
stagnant: 這個詞在講新西蘭的那篇文章里出現(xiàn)過?
The Economist 《經(jīng)濟學人》- 新西蘭大選37歲阿登姐登臺荆残！
retrenching: to change the way things are done in order to spend less money
retrenchment: the company is going through a retrenchment
Might those below the current white-collar professional layer graduate to membership of the middle class?This happened in China, where?hordes?migrated from the countryside to relatively high-paying jobs in factories in coastal areas. But?such opportunities are thin on the ground in India. It has a lower urbanisation rate than its neighbours, and a bigger urban-rural wage gap, with little sign of change. It is not providing jobs to its young people: around a third of under-25s are not in employment, education or training.
There are other structural issues.?Over 90% of workers are employed in the informal sector; most firms are not large or productive enough to pay anything approaching middle-class wages. “Most people in the middle class across the world have a payslip. They have a regular wage that comes with a job,” points out Nancy Birdsall of the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank. And women’s participation in the workforce is low, at 27%; worse, it has fallen by around ten percentage points since 2005, as households seem to have used increases in income to keep women at home. Households that might be able to afford luxuries if both partners worked cannot when only the man does.
horde: a large group of people?
有沒有那些不是白領的人進入中產(chǎn)階級奴艾？ 像中國，很多農(nóng)村的就離開家鄉(xiāng)去更發(fā)達的沿海城市謀生内斯，工資更高一點蕴潦，但印度這種跡象幾乎不可能，因為城市化沒有中國多
Spent force
Across the income?spectrum, households that do make more money tend to spend it not on consumer goods but on better education and healthcare, public provision of which is?abysmal. The education system is possibly India’s most?intractable?problem, preventing it becoming a consumer powerhouse. Attaining middle-class spending power requires a middle-class income, which in turn requires productive ability. Yet most children get fewer than six years of schooling and one in nine is illiterate.Poor diets mean that 38% of children under the age of five are so underfed as to damage their physical and mental capacity irreversibly, according?to the Global Nutrition Report. “What hope is there for them to earn a decent income?” one senior business figure asks.
None of this leaves India as an?irrelevancy?for the world’s biggest companies. Whether India’s consumer class numbers 24m or 80m, that is more than enough to allow some businesses to thrive—plenty of fortunes have been made catering to far smaller places. But businesses assuming the consumer pivot in India is the next unstoppable force in global economics need to ask themselves why it already looks to have run out of puff—and whether it is likely to get a second wind any time soon.
abysmal: extremely poor or bad
intractable: not easily managed, controlled, or solved
印度的教育問題是一個比較棘手的問題俘闯，很多小孩連飯都吃不飽潭苞，身體和精神都跟不上經(jīng)濟發(fā)展需要的能力
總結(jié)：印度經(jīng)濟和中產(chǎn)能不能起飛，只能交給歷史來給出答案了
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Results
Lexile?Measure: 1100L - 1200L
Mean Sentence Length: 17.40
Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.25
Word Count: 870
這篇文章的藍思值是在1100-1200L真朗， 適合英語專業(yè)大二的水平學習此疹，是經(jīng)濟學人里普通難度
使用kindle斷斷續(xù)續(xù)地讀《經(jīng)濟學人》三年，發(fā)現(xiàn)從一開始磕磕碰碰到現(xiàn)在比較順暢地讀完遮婶，進步很大蝗碎，推薦購買！點擊這里可以去亞馬遜官網(wǎng)購買~
