VOA常速英语:Biden On Global Economic Growth

“This is an important moment in the development of the global economy,” U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said recently in Singapore on the challenges to maintaining economic growth.

“When President [Barack] Obama and I took office, it was a time of significant economic crisis,” Vice President Biden said. “We’ve made significant progress: 40 straight months of job growth - we’ve gone from losing over 800,000 jobs a month . . . to creating on an average of 200,000 jobs a month in 2013 . . . There’s also a need to focus on the global economy, [because] growth has slowed in Europe and the Pacific.”

According to Vice President Biden, the path to continuing economic growth is clear.

“The best way to unleash the talents of your people and generate economic opportunity is through greater integration; a level playing field where private enterprise, foreign and domestic, can compete with state-owned enterprise; where there are fewer barriers at and behind the borders; where intellectual property is protected; where domestic content requirements are diminished; where there’s a court system that adjudicates disputes fairly,” he said.

The founder of Apple Steve Jobs, a prime example of America’s economic dynamism, replied when asked what others need to do to be more like him: “Think different.”

“You can only think different where you can breathe free, where you can challenge orthodoxy, where there’s a [certainty] about the rule of law,” Vice President Biden said. “This is the path to growth in the 21st century.”

“We’re working to establish new rules of the road for economic growth and expansion,” Mr. Biden said. “We’re pursuing a Trans-Pacific Partnership [that] . . . has the potential to set new standards for a collective commitment to fair competition . . . This will create a strong incentive . . . for other nations to raise their standards.”

“The Asia-Pacific region . . . is home of a middle class that's more than a billion people . . . an emerging market whose choices will shape the character of the entire world economy,” Vice President Biden said. “[America] will keep working to help create a peaceful region, a stable and growing global economy for all people.”