早稲田政経2011 III

III Read this article and answer the questions below.

[1] A traditional explanation for the persistent poverty of many less-developed countries is that they lack objects such as natural resources or capital goods. But Taiwan, for example, started with little of either and still grew rapidly. Something else must be involved. Increasingly, emphasis is shifting to the notion that it is ideas, not objects, that poor countries lack.

[2] The knowledge needed to provide citizens of the poorest countries with a vastly improved standard of living already exists in the advanced countries. If a poor nation invests in education and does not destroy the incentives for its citizens to acquire ideas from the rest of the world, it can rapidly take advantage of the publicly available part of the worldwide stock of knowledge. If, in addition, it offers incentives for privately held ideas to be put to use within its borders―for example, by protecting foreign patents, copyrights, and licenses; by permitting direct investment by foreign firms; by protecting property rights; and by avoiding heavy regulation and high marginal tax rates―its citizens can soon work in state-of-the-art productive activities.

[3] Some ideas such as insights about public health are rapidly adopted by less-developed countries. As a result, life expectancy in poor countries is catching up with that in the leaders faster than income per capita. Yet governments in poor countries continue to restrict the flow of many other ideas, especially those with commercial value. Automobile producers in North America clearly recognize that they can learn from ideas developed in the rest of the world. But for decades, car firms in India operated in a government-created protective time warp. The Hillman and Austin cars produced in England in the 1950s continued to roll off production lines in India through the 1980s. After independence, India's commitment to closing itself off and striving for self-sufficiency was as strong as Taiwan's commitment to acquiring foreign ideas and participating fully in world markets. The outcomes ( A ).

[4] A poor country like India can achieve enormous increases in standards of living merely by letting in the ideas held by companies from industrialized nations. With a series of economic reforms that started in the 1980s and deepened in the early 1990s, India has begun to open itself up to these opportunities. For some of its citizens, such as the software developers who now ( B ) the rest of the world, these improvements in standards of living have become a reality. This same type of opening up is causing a spectacular transformation of life in China. Its growth in the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century was driven to a very large extent by foreign investment by multinational firms.

[5] Leading countries like the United States, Canada, and the members of the European Union cannot stay ahead ( C ). Rather, they must offer strong incentives for discovering new ideas at home, and this is not easy to do. The same characteristic that makes an idea so valuable―everybody can use it at the same time―also means that it is hard to earn an appropriate rate of return on investments in ideas. The many people who benefit from a new idea can too easily free-ride on the efforts of others

[6] After the transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories, many applied ideas had to be developed before this basic science discovery yielded any commercial value. By now, private firms have developed improved recipes that have brought the cost of a transistor down to less than a millionth of its former level. Yet most of the benefits from those discoveries have been reaped not by the innovating firms, but by the users of the transistors. In 1985, I paid a thousand dollars per million transistors for memory in my computer. In 2005, I paid less than ten dollars per million, and yet I did nothing to deserve or help pay for this windfall. ( D ) Many promising opportunities for exploration, however, would be missed. Both oil companies and consumers would be worse off. The leakage of benefits such as those from improvements in the transistor also acts as a kind of tax and has the same effect on incentives for exploration. For this reason, most economists support government funding for basic scientific research. They also recognize, however, that basic research grants by themselves will not provide the incentives to discover the many small applied ideas needed to transform basic ideas such as the transistor or Web search into valuable products and services.

[7] It takes more than scientists in universities to generate progress and growth. Such seemingly mundane forms of discovery as product and process engineering or the development of new business models can have huge benefits for society as a whole. There are, to be sure, some benefits for the firms that make these discoveries, but not enough to generate innovation at the ideal rate. Giving firms tighter patents and copyrights over new ideas would increase the incentives to make new discoveries, but might also make it much more expensive to build on previous discoveries. Tighter intellectual property rights could therefore be counterproductive and might slow growth.

[8] Perhaps the most important ideas of all are meta-ideas ―ideas about how to support the production and transmission of other ideas. In the seventeenth century, the British invented the modern concept of a patent that protects an invention. North Americans invented the modern research university in the nineteenth century and peer-reviewed competitive grants for basic research in the twentieth. The challenge now facing all of the industrialized countries is to invent new institutions that encourage a higher level of applied, commercially relevant research and development in the private sector

1 Choose the most suitable answer from those below to complete the following sentence.

The writer suggests that less-developed countries should

(a) encourage their citizens to learn about the useful ideas that have been developed elsewhere.

(b) explain their poverty as a result of their lack of natural resources.

(c) resist pressure from developed countries to protect domestic patents and copyrights.

(d) use traditional methods to produce economic growth.

(e) work harder to raise their standard of living to that of developed countries.

2 Choose the most suitable answer from those below to complete the following sentence.

One problem for less-developed countries is that

(a) life expectancy rates have not risen as fast as expected.

(b) manufacturers in North America are unwilling to offer advice.

(c) their governments may prevent good commercial ideas from being adopted.

(d) they have all been too concerned about the importance of self-sufficiency.

(e) they tend to put too much emphasis on producing products such as cars.

3 Choose the most suitable answer from those below to fill in blank space (A)

(a) appear greater than expected

(b) are difficult to foresee

(c) could hardly be more different

(d) will eventually be made clear

(e) would surprise government officials

4 Use five of the seven words below to fill in blank space (B) in the best way. Indicate your choices

for the second and fourth positions

(a) are (b) firms (c) for (d) in (e) located (f) which (g) work

5 Choose the most suitable answer from those below to fill in blank space (C)

(a) merely by adopting ideas developed elsewhere

(b) simply through expanding investment overseas

(c) unless they build factories in other countries

(d) until finally assisting those less developed than themselves

(e) without first paying attention to what India and China have done

6 Choose the most suitable order of sentences from those below to fill in blank space (D).

(a) Some oil would still be found by chance.

(b) Suppose the government took away most of the oil discovered by oil companies and gave it to consumers.

(c) That would be like putting a heavy tax on these companies.

(d) The result would be that oil companies would do much less exploration.

7 Choose the most suitable answer from those below to complete the following sentence.

Economists support basic scientific research paid for by the government because

(a) it only requires relatively low levels of government funding.

(b) private firms often complain about paying excessive taxes

(c) scientific technology is too complex for businesses to deal with

(d) the companies that develop a new invention may fail to benefit from it.

(e) the profits go to the innovators themselves

8 Choose the most suitable answer from those below to complete the following sentence.

The writer suggests that developed countries need to

(a) create centers that will assist in the commercial development of ideas.

(b) increase the number of scientists working for the government.

(c) rely more on economists to generate further growth.

(d) return to the methods originally used by British and American inventors.

(e) tighten intellectual property rights in order to produce more tax income.