A lingua franca lowers transaction costs across borders; the more widely English is adopted,

the more savings it generates. Although there is evidence that the pace of globalization is
slowing, international trade is a significant potion of the world economy, with exports making
up around 20% of the world's economic output. We consistently find a correlation between
ease of doing business and a county's English proficiency, as well as speaking English and
a range of logistics-related indicators. Billions of people around the globe are desperately
trying to learn English--not simply for self-improvement, but as an economic necessity. If's
easy to take for granted being born in a country where people speak the lingua franca of
global business, but for people in emerging economies such as China, Russia, and Brazil,
where English is not the official language, good English is a critical tool, which people rightly
believe will help them tap into new opportunities at home and abroad.

Human capital development

The latest edition of the EF EPI, English Proficiency Index, found that for economies around
the world, higher English proficiency correlates with the higher gross domestic product,
higher net income, and higher productivity. To be clear, there's no evidence that English
proficiency drives this economic success. But the complex relationship between language
skills and economic growth -with greater wealth facilitating more English training, and
English skills helping economies stay competitive highlights the role that English can play
in broader schemes for economic growth. Research shows a direct correlation between the
English skills of a population and the economic performance of the country. in almost every
one of the 60 countries and territories surveyed, a rise in English proficiency was connected
with a rise in per capita income. And on an individual level, recruiters and HR managers
around the world report that job seekers with exceptional English compared to their country's
level earned 30-50% per cent higher salaries.

BETTER ENGLISH AND INCOME GO HAND IN HAND

English proficiencyshows a strong correlation with a country'sgross national income

GROSS NATIONAL INCOME PER CAPITA

s80,000

Singapore
60,000

40.000

Russia Estonia
20:000 Panama
Brazil
India
60 70
EF EPISCORE
SOURCE UNITED NATIONS,GNI PER CAPITA PPP9) 2012 AND EF FPI2013 REPORT HBR.ORG

Services from afar

Services represent a growing share of global economic activity, but they are more difficult to
export than goods. iPhones can be shipped anywhere; accountants cannot. There is a
correlation between English proficiency and a country's service exports as well as the
value-added per worker in services. As the complexity and sophistication of economic
exchange increase, so does the demand for linguistic competencies. A growing number of
MBA programs demand fluency in English and a second, sometimes third, language.

Speaking the same language as a trading partner is not only a technical necessity but also a
basis for building trust. That trust is reflected in the data: economist Pankaj Ghemawat
estimates that countries that share a language trade 42% more with each other than they
would if they did not share a language. Although technology and Al will increasingly assist in
routine translation, we are a long way from a language engine that can understand the
cultural nuances humans routinely navigate in everyday communication.

Far from the English-only business environment decried by linguistic protectionists, today's
multinational firms engage with a diverse linguistic landscape. True, there is a drive to use
English as the fastest and cheapest mode of communication between speakers of different
languages, but investment in other languages is high, too. According to national agencies for
language promotion, at least 150 million people worldwide are currently studyingFrench
Spanish, or Chinese as foreign languages. There is enormous trust to be gained by learning
the native languages of your partners.

Economics relates to every aspect of human life. For instance, literature was always
exclusively for people who could read. As more people had money and free time, literature
became widely popular and remunerative. Witers became widely famous and more people
tried their hand at writing.

In the 20th century, cinema became a new form of literature-literature for the eyes and later
the eyes and ears. Films adapted stories and novels and eventually became original literary
sources. For many years, TV series were anthologies in which the same characters
appeared in various stories. Now television series have become "novelistic," with characters
who have extended stories. And while all of this is going on, print literature-stories, novels,
essays, poems and poetry-continues to have a market, which has been influenced
economically by the digital revolution. Now books are not only published by publishing
houses and purchased in stores but written and sold by individuals and small presses and
sold via the Internet. Like literature, economics reflects significant changes in society in how
goods and services are produced and marketed.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell's speech at the National Association for Business
Economics on October 6 is a case in point. In the first two minutes alone he referred to a
dizzying range of economic indicators: growth, unemployment rate, personal consumption
expenditures inflation, labour force participation, productivity gains, real wage gains and so
on. But if you watch the speech, you may notice that he rarely cites the actual numbers. That
is because Powell, and economists generally, tend to be more interested in the direction in
which the numbers are going rather than the numbers themselves. Is unemployment high or
low? Is the Dow up or down? Is GDP growth trending upward or downward?

In other words, Powell is telling you a story. And although economists have historically
wantedtheirfield to be associated with the so-called hard sciences- a conjuring act
exemplified by the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences - I have come to see it as
having a lot more in common with literature, especially novels, than physics or chemistry.
As a literary scholar researching economics and its history, I have found that being aware of
the similarities between economists and novelists helps us to better evaluate the claims they
make. Both are telling stories. Understanding that empowers us to judge the credibility of
what they are saying for ourselves.