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The consular staff of the destination country simply decide whether to grant the visa, and slap a sticker in the passport of successful applicants. For the contractors, it is a nice little earner. VFS probably enjoys operating margins of 20%, reckons Kathleen Gailliot, an analyst at Natixis, a French bank. The companies are given a free hand to pad their earnings with pricey “premium” services. In Mumbai, for example, VFS offers Indians applying for British visas a text on their mobile phones to notify them that their passports are ready for collection, at 128 rupees ($2) a shot. For an extra 2,548 rupees, applicants can use a special “lounge” area while submitting their documents, and have their passports posted back to them. VFS accounts for just 5% of Kuoni's revenues but more than 60% of its operating profits. So bright are the division's prospects that its parent company is getting out of the tour-operator business, which it has been in since 1906, to concentrate on visa-processing and a few other specialist travel services. Until VFS opened its Mumbai office, applicants had to queue for an average of five hours in the sweltering heat outside the American consulate. After the job was handed to the contractor, the typical waiting time fell to one hour. However, applicants still have no choice but to submit to whatever petty demands contractors make—such as, say, banning them from using mobile phones while they sit waiting for their appointments. If the staff are rude, the queues are badly managed or the “extras” extravagantly priced, travellers can hardly take their business elsewhere. The application-processing firms are profiting both from travellers' lack of choice and from governments' failure to consider the economic damage caused by their visa requirements. There is scant evidence that making all travellers submit the same documents every time they want to travel, or provide extensive financial details, protects countries from terrorists or illegal immigrants. In contrast, there is evidence of how liberal visa regimes bring in the bucks. A report in 2014 from the European Parliament, “A Smarter Visa Policy for Economic Growth”, estimated that over-strict visa rules probably cost the EU economy 250,000 jobs and 12.6 billion euro ($13.8 billion) a year in lost output. It recommended requiring fewer documents from applicants, handing out longer visas and simplifying the whole process. Since Britain is not part of the Schengen group, Chinese people taking a tour of Europe have to apply for a second visa to cross the Channel. Only 6% of them do so, says Euromonitor, a research firm. The British Tourist Authority has complained that the country's visa policies cost it ￡2.8 billion ($4.1 billion) a year in lost revenue. However, amid worries about the wave of asylum-seekers from Syria and elsewhere, governments in Europe and beyond will face pressure to keep making life hard for tourists and business travellers—even as other departments of those same governments spend heavily on promoting tourism and foreign investment. （全文共487个词）（红色标注词为考研重点词汇）
考研重点词汇： concentrate ['kɒns(ə)ntreɪt] n. 浓缩，精选；浓缩液 vi. 集中；浓缩；全神贯注；聚集 vt. 集中；浓缩 sweltering ['swelt(ə)rɪŋ] adj. 闷热的；热得难受的 recommend [rekə'mend] vt. 推荐，介绍；劝告；使受欢迎；托付 vi. 推荐；建议 每天一篇双语经济学人没有看够！ |
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