Reading 1/2:
Read the text and choose the best answer A. B. C or D.
THE NEW GLOBAL SHIFT
A. 'The handwriting is on the wall,' writes an IT specialist at the Bank of America. Until recently the bank needed talent so badly it had to outbid rivals.But last fall, his entire 15-engineer team was told their jobs were redundant. Bank of America has already slashed 3,700 of its 25,000 technical and back-office jobs and more are to follow.
B. Corporate downsizings are nothing new. These layoffs, though, aren't just happening because demand has dried up; one-third of those jobs are headed to India, where work that costs $100 an hour in the US gets done for $20. At Infosys Technologies Ltd. in Bangalore, India, 250 engineers are developing computer applications for Bank of America. About 1,600km north, at Wipro Spectramind Ltd. 2,500 young college-educated men and women are checking accident reports for an insurance company and providing help-desk support for a big internet service provider all at a cost up to 60% lower than in the USA.
C. It's globalization's next phase- and one of the biggest trends reshaping the global economy. The first phase started two decades ago with the
transfer of manufacturing jobs to economically developing countries. After that, simple service work, like processing credit card receipts, and digital
labor, like writing software code, began fleeing high-cost countries.
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D. Now, all kinds of knowledge work can be done almost anywhere. The driving forces are digitization, the internet, and high-speed data networks that circle the globe. By mining databases over the internet, offshore staff can check individuals' credit records, analyse corporate financial information, and search through oceans of economic statistics.
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E. The impact of offshore hiring is hard to measure, since so far a tiny portion of US white-collar work has jumped overseas. Indeed, a case can be made that the US will see a net gain from this shift. In the 1990s, the USA had to import hundreds of thousands of immigrants to ease engineering short-ages. Now, by sending routine service and engineering tasks to nations with a surplus of educated workers, the US labor force and capital can be redeployed to higher-value industries.
F. Globalization should also keep service prices in check, just as it did when manufacturing went offshore. Companies will be able to reduce overheads and improve efficiency. 'Our comparative advantage may shift to other fields,' says economist Robert Lipsey, and if productivity is high.then the US will maintain a high standard of living. By encouraging economic development in nations such as India, meanwhile, US companies will have expanded foreign markets for their goods and services
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