Hungry for work

渴求工作

 

If these economies were getting going again, those who stayed in cities should be able to find plenty of work, given the exodus to the countryside. Poor workers still have the same skills they had six months ago; most are keen to use them. But demand for labour remains low. Vishwanath Kamble used to earn around 350 rupees a day as a cobbler in Mumbai. With offices shut and few passers-by, he more often gets only ten rupees nowadays. When he says his daily prayers, he pleads for things to go back to how they were before. That is still far off. Data from Google Maps show that even in mid-September visits to Mumbai’s restaurants, cinemas and shopping centres were down by over 70% compared with January and early February.

如果这些经济体重新开始运转，考虑到大量人口涌向农村，留在城市的人应该能够找到大量工作。贫穷的工人仍然拥有与六个月前相同的技能;大多数人都热衷于雇佣他们。但对劳动力的需求仍然很低。Vishwanath Kamble曾经在孟买做鞋匠，每天能挣350卢比。由于办公室关闭，路人寥寥无几，如今他通常只能拿到10卢比。当他每天做祷告的时候，他恳求一切回到从前的样子。这还远远不够。谷歌Maps的数据显示，即便是在9月中旬，去孟买餐馆、电影院和购物中心的游客数量也比1月和2月初下降了70%以上。

词汇

given the /考虑到；鉴于

Exodus/大批的离去（复数 exoduses）

Rupee/卢比（货币）

Cobbler/补鞋匠；工匠

Plead/借口；为...辩护；托称

Widespread fears about the spread of the virus are still hampering any recovery. “I’m scared too, but what can I do? I have to go to work,” says Munni Mehra, a maid looking for a job in Mumbai. Her husband is working as a cook, earning 10,000 rupees a month. But if Ms Mehra stays at home much longer they will have to go back to their village in Uttarakhand, in India’s far north. Domestic workers see the irony in how middle-class employers think they are the ones at risk if they rehire house servants, says Martha Chen of Harvard, who has been interviewing informal workers around the world throughout the crisis.

对病毒传播的广泛担忧仍然阻碍着任何复苏。“我也很害怕，但我能做什么呢?”在孟买找工作的女佣Munni Mehra说。她的丈夫是一名厨师，每月收入1万卢比。但是，如果Mehra女士在家里呆得太久，他们将不得不回到他们位于印度最北部北阿坎德邦的村庄。哈佛大学的Martha Chen在危机期间采访了世界各地的非正式工人，她说，家政工人看到了讽刺，中产阶级雇主认为，如果他们重新雇佣佣人，他们就会面临风险（个人理解为财产支配&佣人是否携带疾病两种风险，后者下文写道佣人并非去人员密集场所的主题）。

词汇

Irony/讽刺；反语；具有讽刺意味的事

 

Cleaners, with their meagre salaries, are not the ones visiting shopping malls, spas and cinemas where covid-19 thrives. Raju, a flower-seller in the same city, can no longer deliver flowers to people’s homes because security guards will not let him into posh blocks of flats. With no trains running, he has been unable to get to the wholesale market, so has had to use pricier local suppliers. As a result his costs have soared. Since covid-19 took hold in India, his earnings have almost halved, from 13,000 a month to 7,000 rupees.

拿着微薄薪水的清洁工，并不是光顾购物中心、水疗中心和电影院的人，而这些地方正是新冠病毒流行的地方。Raju是同一座城市的一名花商，由于保安不让他进入高档公寓，他再也不能给人们送花至家中了。由于没有火车运行，他无法到达批发市场，因此不得不求助于价格更高的当地供应商。结果，他的成本飙升。自从新冠在印度流行以来，他的收入几乎减半，从每月1.3万卢比降至7000卢比。

词汇

 Meagre/瘦的；贫弱的；贫乏的

posh/华丽的；奢侈的

 

Nor can poor countries rely on foreign spending. The sharp fall in oil prices earlier this year was enough to slash revenues in countries like Nigeria and Angola that rely on oil exports. In two-thirds of poor countries, commodities make up more than 60% of total merchandise exports, according to the UN’s latest estimates, rising to 88% in Zambia and 100% in Angola. Foreign tourists are not booking safaris in east Africa or beach breaks in Bali. Demand for exports such as Kenyan flowers and Bangladeshi garments has slumped, too. These industries can expect to recover when the pandemic subsides and borders reopen. But the poor cannot wait.

穷国也不能依赖外国支出。今年早些时候石油价格的大幅下跌足以削减尼日利亚和安哥拉等依赖石油出口的国家的收入。据联合国最新估计，在三分之二的贫穷国家，商品出口占商品出口总额的60%以上，赞比亚为88%，安哥拉为100%。外国游客没有预订东非的狩猎之旅，也没有预订巴厘岛的海滩度假。对肯尼亚鲜花和孟加拉国服装等出口商品的需求也大幅下降。当疫情平息，边境重新开放时，这些行业有望复苏。但是穷人不能再等了。

词汇

Garment/衣服，服装；外表

 

 

For the time being they must rely on help from their own governments. The World Bank reckons that in the past six months 212 countries and territories have rolled out—or made plans to roll out—1,179 social-protection measures that will reach 2bn people. As well as the usual efforts to hand out food and waive utility bills, poor countries are trying out new ideas. Kenya’s government has started a programme to give temporary jobs to more than 26,000 young Kenyans. Montenegro’s is offering subsidies to the tune of 70% of the minimum wage to encourage employers to create new jobs.

目前他们必须依靠本国政府的帮助。世界银行估计，在过去的6个月里，212个国家和地区已经或计划推出1179项社会保障措施，这些措施将惠及20亿人口。除了分发食物和免除公用事业费用的常规做法外，贫穷国家也在尝试新的策略。肯尼亚政府启动了一项计划，为2.6万多名肯尼亚年轻人提供临时工作。黑山共和国提供的补贴高达最低工资的70%，以鼓励雇主创造新的就业机会。

词汇

Waive/放弃；搁置

 

Cash handouts, heralded by policymakers for years as a cheap and effective form of support, are proving most popular. Technology is helping. A new national ID system in the Philippines and a unified digital payment system in Tunisia have been speeded up, so that governments can get cash to the poor faster. The Democratic Republic of Congo wants to use mobile-phone data to locate the poor and then send money directly to their e-wallets. In July the central bank also said it would set up special accounts—either through banks or online—to hand out emergency cash.

事实证明，多年来被政策制定者标榜为一种廉价而有效的支持形式的现金发放最受欢迎。科技也在提供帮助。菲律宾的新国民身份证系统和突尼斯的统一数字支付系统已经在加快落实，这样政府就可以更快地向穷人发放现金。刚果民主共和国希望利用手机数据来确定穷人，然后将钱直接发送到他们的电子钱包里。今年7月，央行还表示将通过银行或网上设立特殊账户来发放应急现金。

词汇

Herald/宣布，通报

 

But such schemes are useful only if governments can afford to hand out serious lumps of cash. Poor countries on average have spent just $4 a head on programmes to help the poor during the covid-19 crisis, compared with an average of $695 per head of the population in rich countries such as Britain, France and America, according to World Bank estimates. The Congolese government plans to hand out $50m to just two million people in Kinshasa and other badly affected provinces, amounting to $25 for each recipient.

但这些计划只有在政府能够负担得起大量现金的情况下才有用。据世界银行估计，在新冠危机期间，贫穷国家在帮助穷人的项目上平均每人只花费4美元，而在富裕国家，如英国、法国和美国，人均花费为695美元。刚果政府计划向金沙萨和其他受灾严重省份的200万人发放5000万美元，相当于每人25美元。

 

And in other countries governments are doing far from enough. A World Bank survey in Ethiopia in June found that 2% of households had received government help in the previous three weeks. A poll of people in Indian cities by the London School of Economics at around the same time found that only a fifth of those responding had received any money from the government. The transfers on average made up less than a quarter of their monthly salary.

而在其他国家，政府做得还远远不够。世界银行6月份在埃塞俄比亚进行的一项调查发现，2%的家庭在过去三周内接受了政府援助。与此同时，伦敦政治经济学院(London School of Economics)在印度城市进行的一项民意调查发现，只有五分之一的受访者接受过政府的捐款。平均而言，（财政）转账所得不到他们月薪的四分之一。

 

Other governments are barely doing anything at all. Residents of Cañales, a poor suburb of Cárdenas, a smallish city in the Mexico, say the only help they have received was a single round of food packages from the state government in May. Marco Antonio González Cruz has been jobless since the pandemic struck. But he isn’t holding out for help from politicians. “They only come when they want the vote,” he says. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-wing populist, created a slew of welfare programmes after taking office in 2018, including an expanded pensions system, an apprenticeship scheme for the young and a tree-planting programme in a number of Mexico’s states. But he has provided close to nothing in response to the worst recession the country has seen in a century.

其他政府几乎什么都没做。卡纳莱斯是墨西哥一个小城市卡德纳斯的贫困郊区，当地居民说，他们得到的唯一帮助是州政府5月份发放的一袋食品。自从大流行爆发以来，Marco Antonio Gonzalez Cruz一直失业。但他并没有向政客们寻求帮助。“他们只有在需要投票的时候才会来，”他这样说道。左翼民粹主义者、总统Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador在2018年上任后创建了一系列福利项目，包括扩大养老金体系、为年轻人提供学徒培训计划以及在墨西哥多个州实施的植树计划。但在应对国家百年来最严重的经济衰退方面，他几乎没有提供任何措施。

Because the urban poor have been harder hit than those in rural areas, governments need to spend any money they do have more cleverly. The Indian government should expand its rural employment guarantee scheme to urban areas, suggests Abhijit Banerjee, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The programme, which provides 100 days of guaranteed work every year, could deploy low-skilled workers as assistants in primary schools or care workers for the elderly. “If the cities recover, then there is hope,” argues Mr Banerjee, who won the Nobel prize for economics last year.

由于城市贫困人口比农村贫困人口受到的打击更大，政府需要更明智地使用他们手头的任何资金。麻省理工学院的经济学家Abhijit Banerjee建议，印度政府应该将其农村就业保障计划扩大到城市地区。该计划每年提供100天有保障的工作，可以安排低技能工人在小学担任助理或为老年人提供护理。去年获得诺贝尔经济学奖的Banerjee表示:“如果城市复苏，那么就有希望。”

 

Governments will struggle to continue funding such efforts as revenues fall. Emerging-market governments issued $124bn in hard-currency debt in the first six months of the year. But there are limits to how much more they can borrow. The recent wave of sovereign downgrades has been startling, even compared with previous crises.

随着财政收入的下降，政府将很难继续为这类努力提供资金。今年上半年，新兴市场政府发行了1240亿美元的硬通货债券。但他们能借到的更多资金是有限的。即使与之前的危机相比，最近的主权债务降级浪潮也是令人吃惊的。

词汇

sovereign wealth fund   /主权基金（主要由政府投资）