世新大學九十三學年度碩博士班考試試題卷

學 系 別	考 試 科 目
社會發展研究所	英文

※考生請於答案卷內作答

1. Translation: 請將下列英文翻譯為中文(60%)

Marxism forms the philosophical and theoretical basis for a range of neo-Marxist theories that combine historical materialist notions with a number of other critical traditions; examples most obviously include dependency and world systems theories, but also neostructural notions, like regulation theory. The basic message of the dependency school was that European development was predicated on the active underdevelopment of the non-European world. For dependency theorists, Europe’s development was based on external destruction: brutal conquest, colonial control, and the stripping of non-Western societies of their peoples, resources, and surpluses. From historical processes like these came a new global geography of European First World center and non-European Third World periphery. The relationship between center and periphery assumed, for the Brazilian geographer Teontonio Dos Santos(1970), the spatial form of dependence, in which some countries (the dominant) achieved self-sustaining economic growth, while others (the dominated and dependent) grew only as a reflection of changes in the dominant countries. The incorporation of Latin America into the capitalist world economy, directly through (Spanish and Portuguese) colonial administration, but more subtly through foreign trade, gear the region’s economies toward demands from the center, even when the export economy was locally owned. Dependence skewed the region’s social structure so that local power was held by a small ruling class that used the gains from exporting for luxury consumption rather than investment. Real power was exercised from external centers of command in dominant (“metropolitan”) countries. Dependence continues into the present through international ownership of the region’s most dynamic sectors, multinational corporate control over technology, and payment of royalties, interest, and profits.

2. Reading Comprehension (40%)

閱讀以下文字，並回答問題(1)至問題(4)

I focus on three source of tension between the global market and social stability and offer a brief overview of them here.

First, reduced barriers to trade and investment accentuate the asymmetry between groups that can cross international borders (either directly or indirectly, say through outsourcing) and those that cannot. In the first category are owners of capital, highly skilled workers, and many professionals, who are free to take their resources where they are most in demand. Unskilled and semiskilled workers and most middle managers belong in the second category. Putting the same point in more technical terms, globalization makes the demand for the services of individuals in the second category more elastic – that is, the services of large segments of the working population can be more easily substituted by the services of other people across national boundaries. Globalization therefore fundamentally transforms the employment relationship.

The fact that “worker” can be more easily substituted for each other across national boundaries undermines what many conceive to be a postwar social bargain between workers and employers, under which the former would receive a steady increase in wages benefits in return for labor peace. This is because increased substitutability results in the following concrete consequences:

˙ Workers now have to pay a large share of cost of improvements in work conditions and benefits (that is, they bear a greater incidence of nonwage costs).

˙They have to incur greater instability in earnings and hours worked in response to shocks to labor demand or labor productivity (that is, volatility and insecurity increase).

˙Their bargaining power erodes, so they receive lower wages and benefits whenever bargaining is an element in setting the terms of employment.

These considerations have received insufficient attention in the recent academic literature on trade and wages, which has focused on the downward shift in demand for unskilled workers rather than the increase in the elasticity of that demand.

Second, globalization engenders conflicts within and between nations over domestic norms and the social institutions that embody them. As the technology for manufactured goods becomes standardized and diffused internationally, nations with very different sets of values, norms, instructions, and collective preferences begin to compete head on in markets for similar goods. And the spread of globalization creates opportunities for trade between countries at very different levels of development.

Third, globalization has made it exceedingly difficult for governments to provide social insurance- one of their central functions and one that has helped maintain social cohesion and domestic political support for ongoing liberalization throughout the postwar period. In essence, governments have used their fiscal powers to insulate domestic groups from excessive market risks, particularly those having an external origin. In fact, there is a striking correlation between an economy’s exposure to foreign trade and the size of its welfare state. It is in the most open countries, such as Sweden, Denmark, and Netherlands, that spending on income transfers has expanded the most. This is not to say that the government is the sole, or the best, provider of social insurance. The extended family, religious groups, and local communities often play similar roles. My point is that is it is a hallmark of the postwar period that governments in the advanced countries have been expected to provide such insurance.

(1) 根據上文，全球市場和社會穩定之間產生緊張的第一種情形是什麼？(10%)

(2) 工人的可替代性提高，會導致哪三種具體後果？(10%)

(3) 在全球化所引發的第二種衝突裡，技術的作用是什麼？(10%)

(4) 文中以瑞典、丹麥和荷蘭等國為例，是要說明什麼？(10%)