Shadowing Practice: Why Europe's GDP Growth Is Crippling Its Economy - Learn English Speaking with Video
Les maken...
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European governments are doing something they haven't done since the tail
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end of the cold war they are ramping up military spending
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fast since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 EU defense spending has
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rapidly increased jumping by more than 20 % in 2025 alone
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and by the end of this year it's expected to be 75 % higher than in 2021.
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Now on the surface that's a strange thing for a stagnant
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economy to be doing for the better part of two decades
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Europe's economy has been the sick man of the developed world the continent has seen stagnant growth stalled productivity
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and youth unemployment that would be treated as a national emergency almost anywhere else
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so is this just reckless spending well maybe it isn't
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because there's an old slightly uncomfortable idea in economics
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that says pouring government money into almost anything tanks included can
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act as a genuine shot in the arm for an economy
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that badly needs one so what's actually going on with europe's military spending and why now?
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Could this realistically boost Europe's economy?
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And if so, at what cost?
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212 this isn't financial advice investing puts your capital at risk
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so to understand how unusual this moment is you have to
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appreciate just how long european defense spending had been going the other way from the early 1980s onward
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and especially once the cold war ended defense budgets across the
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continent were the easiest line item in the world to cut
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there was no obvious threat the political rewards for cutting were immediate
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and the costs of cutting were entirely theoretical which meant
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that every finance minister who trimmed a few tank battalions got to fund a hospital wing instead
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and nobody complained that's how defense spending among nato's european members
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went from roughly three percent of gdp in the early 1980s
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down to somewhere around 1 .6 by 2020 then february 2022 happened
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and a threat
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that had been theoretical for three decades became a war on
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the eastern edge of the european union what followed has been fast by the standards of government spending
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which is to say it has still taken years
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but it has moved in addition to eu countries pushing defense
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spending up by 20 in 2025 defense investment meaning the money actually spent on new equipment
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and research rather than wages and fuel has more than doubled since 2021.
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In June 2025, NATO made the whole thing official at its summit in The Hague.
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Members agree to spend 3 .5 % of GDP on core defense by 2035, plus another 1 .5 % on defense -related infrastructure and resilience on top of that.
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Call it 5 % of GDP all up, which for context is roughly what many European countries currently spend on their entire education systems.
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Now, not everyone's in the same rush.
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As you'd probably guess, it's the countries bordering Russia, Kaliningrad, or Belarus that are racing hardest.
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Poland's spending is already at roughly 4 .5 % of GDP, which is the highest in NATO.
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That works out to something like 1 euro in every 9 the government collects in total revenue, and closer to a fifth of the central state budget, which is an enormous share to hand to one department.
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Lithuania and Estonia have committed to going above 5 % from 2026, which means they clear the alliance's 2035 target more than a decade early.
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Now, the bigger economies further from that border have made large commitments of their own, though noticeably less aggressive ones.
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The UK's path is much more gradual than the Baltic states because it's constrained by its own fiscal rules.
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France is in a tighter spot.
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With deficits above 5 % of GDP and debt above 110%, it has yet to set an official timeline for reaching NATO's 5 % goal.
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Instead, France has committed to spending 64 billion euros on defence by 2027
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but that's a fixed amount not a percentage target
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and it barely moves france's defense spending past the roughly 2
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% of gdp it's already at now germany's situation is different germany actually has real fiscal room to move
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and it has used it the country went as far as
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amending its own constitution to loosen the debt break a rule written into the basic law back in 2009
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and binding on federal borrowing from 2016 specifically to carve out
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defense spending above a threshold of about 1 % of gdp
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and germany isn't the only one finding room by bending its
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own rules across the block 18 countries have activated an escape clause in the blocks fiscal rules
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which lets them spend up to an extra 1 .5 percent
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of gdp on defense fence specifically above their 2021 level without
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technically breaching the deficit limits they all agreed to now even with clever rule bending this is still debt
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and debt this size usually comes with an expectation of a
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return europe more than most needs something to show for it
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as the continent has had close to two decades of pretty weak growth productivity
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that has barely moved compared to the united states
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and youth unemployment sitting at around 15 across the euro area as of 2025.
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so europe badly wants growth from more or less anywhere it can get it
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and there's a long -standing idea in economics
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that says the military might be one way to achieve it it's called military keynesianism
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and the logic is fairly simple government spending stimulates an economy regardless of what it buys
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because the money doesn't stop moving once the government hands it over a euro
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that starts out buying an artillery shell still ends up in a factory worker's paycheck
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and that worker spends it at a supermarket
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and the supermarket pays its staff and so on down the line economists call
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that the multiplier effect and it's the same mechanism whether the government is building schools
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or submarines so in the short term there's a genuinely reasonable case
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that military spending helps the economy when growth is weak
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and youth unemployment is that concentrated a large
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and sustained injection of government money is exactly the kind of blunt instrument
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that puts people back to work quickly even
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if it isn't the cleverest possible use of the money blunt instruments have their place
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and an economy with idle workers and idle factories is precisely where they work best
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but what happens over 10
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or 20 years well a lot depends on what kind of
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company is actually receiving the check some of the biggest defense
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primes are essentially pure play military businesses huntington ingalls for example builds aircraft carriers submarines
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and destroyers and not much else with something like 95 of its sales going to government customers
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which means the money that goes in tends to stay inside a walled off military economy
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but plenty of europe's biggest manufacturers sit on both sides of the military civilian line.
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Dassault builds the Rafale fighter and it builds the Falcon private jet, in the same company using overlapping engineering teams.
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Airbus is the same story on a much bigger scale, with commercial airliners, military transports, helicopters and satellites all under one corporate roof.
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And Thales, Leonardo, Rheinmetall and Saab all straddle the same line to varying degrees.
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So the theory goes something like this.
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Pump money into the dual -use companies now and you aren't only buying weapons, you're rebuilding industrial capacity at the same time.
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You're paying to reopen production lines, to rebuild supplier networks that had withered away, and most importantly, to train a generation of machinists,
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welders, systems engineers, and software people who currently don't exist in the numbers Europe needs.
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And when the military side eventually slows down, which historically it always does, that industrial capacity can swing back towards civilian aircraft, cars, rail, or electronics.
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That's the optimistic version, and it isn't a silly one.
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Though it's worth noting the trend is currently running the other way
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because Rheinmetall has been converting civilian automotive plants over to defence production, not the other way around, which is a bet that military demand is going to last.
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Now, whether any of this works depends enormously on one detail, which is where the money physically goes.
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If a government spends its defence budget with its own manufacturers, the money recirculates.
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It becomes wages, which become consumer spending, which becomes revenue for local businesses, and a slice of it comes back to the treasury as tax.
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If that same government buys its equipment from a manufacturer in another country, the stimulus effect largely leaves with the money,
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which is a big part of why European governments fight so hard to keep military production in -house, even when buying off the shelf from abroad would be cheaper and faster.
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Though to be fair, domestic production is favoured for other strategic reasons.
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Nobody wants their air force to depend on a supplier who could decide, for entirely unrelated political reasons, to stop supplying them.
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And when a country does rely on foreign suppliers, governments want to at least fully trace what's actually in their supply chain, although sometimes that's impossible.
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Chinese -made circuit boards and everyday electronics have turned up inside multi -million dollar western military drones, and it's near impossible to fully purge them without building an entire separate supply chain.
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That's a fascinating rabbit hole on its own, but we don't have time to get into it here, so we'll cover it in our next newsletter.
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If you're interested, you can sign up using the link in the description.
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Now, as we've seen, there's a real case to be made about higher military spending boosting the economy, but is that what happens in practice?
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Economists measure how much bang you get from government spending using something called a fiscal multiplier
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which is just the amount of extra economic output you get
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for every euro the government spends a multiplier of one means a euro spent produces a euro of extra output
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so you break even in growth terms anything above one means the spending is genuinely generative
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because the money keeps working after the government lets go of it
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and anything below one means some of that money is being lost displaced
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or spent on things
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that don't circulate now the research on defense spending specifically tends
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to land below one with most estimates clustering somewhere between 0 .3
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and 0 .8 the reason the average lands
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so low has less to do with tanks being evil
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and more to do with what defense budgets are actually spent
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on nearly half of euro area defense spending is personnel costs meaning wages pensions
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and allowances for people already employed by the state once you add operations maintenance fuel
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and general upkeep consumption type spending makes up roughly 70 percent of the total research
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and development which is the part
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that generates the technological spillovers everyone points to gets under five percent
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if european spending stays this consumption heavy the estimated 10 -year cumulative multiplier works out to only around 0 .2
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which means across an entire decade every five euros spent generates
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about one euro of extra output not one euro a year one euro total now
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if the same money went predominantly into investment and research rather than wages
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and upkeep that multiplier could climb toward one
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and in the most optimistic scenarios higher still but that requires spending
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that is very large sustained across many years
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and pointed at an innovation ecosystem capable of absorbing it
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and turning it into commercial products europe is not obviously in
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that position right now
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which is a polite way of saying the continent's record on
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turning research into scaled up companies has been its central economic
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weakness for the better part of the last three decades
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and then there's the leakage problem sitting on top of all
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of it close to 80 of procurement spending has gone to suppliers outside the eu most of it american
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which means a meaningful chunk of the money spent on defense
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is being paid for by european taxpayers borrowed against european balance sheets
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and then handed to factories in texas
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and georgia all other things being equal that's still money
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that buys real capability it just doesn't buy much european growth on the way through now
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so far we've looked at whether the money europe has invested in its military could grow the economy
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but there's a question we haven't asked yet what could this
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money have done somewhere else the cleanest way to explain it
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is with the broken window fallacy you might well have come across it before
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so we'll keep this quick a kid smashes a shop window
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and the shopkeeper pays a glazier to get it fixed
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which looks like economic activity but
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if the window hadn't broken the shopkeeper would have spent
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that money somewhere else anyway maybe on a new suit
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or maybe on getting a nice meal so no new wealth was created the money just moved.
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Defense spending has exactly this trap built into it.
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The jobs are real, the factory activity is real, the contracts, the wages, the towns that get rebuilt around a shipyard, all completely real.
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In the same way the glazier getting paid is real.
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The question is what those same workers, factories and euros would otherwise have been doing.
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Put a billion euros into warships versus a billion euros into a bridge, and on the day the money is spent, the two look basically identical in the national accounts.
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The difference only shows up over time.
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The bridge keeps paying you back for decades.
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It shortens commutes, it lets freight move more cheaply, it makes businesses on both sides of it more productive, and it adds a little bit of economic value every single day,
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it stands there doing nothing in particular.
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The warship needs constant upkeep, a crew, fuel, refits, and eventually replacement.
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Once it's built it doesn't produce anything else, it just costs money to keep existing.
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That's not an argument that the warship is a waste, because a warship is doing a job the bridge cannot do.
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But they are different kinds of purchases
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and only one of them compounds this is really just a
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modern version of an old idea in economics called guns versus
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butter a country has a finite amount of stuff at any given moment
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so much labor so many factories so much steel so many engineers
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so many euros of borrowing capacity before the bond market starts asking questions every one of those resources
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that goes into guns is a resource
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that can't go into butter meaning hospitals schools housing energy infrastructure
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or whatever else it might have built
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and in europe's specific case the tension is sharpened by the fact
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that the continent has a fairly long list of things it
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urgently needs to build from electricity grids to housing to the
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energy infrastructure it's been reworking since it started weaning itself off russian gas
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so honestly military spending is probably not a great economic stimulus
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but it's probably better than nothing given where europe's economy already was now the only problem with everything we've discussed
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so far is that it's been focused on one question does military spending grow the economy
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but it's worth stepping back and asking whether
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that is measuring the thing we actually care about gdp is just the total value of all the final goods
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and services a country produces in a year it counts activity
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not whether any of it actually helped anyone all it's really
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asking is did the money move imagine the best case version
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of european rearmament the multiplier comes in strong the money stays domestic industrial capacity gets rebuilt
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and gdp genuinely ticks upward for a decade none of
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that on its own tells you whether europeans ended up healthier safer better educated
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or happier compare it to a measure like infant mortality
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which is one of the most sensitive indicators economists have for whether a society is actually functioning
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because infant mortality numbers reflect access to health care nutrition sanitation maternal education
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and general living standards all compressed into a single number
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that is very hard to fake a euro spent on a neonatal incubator
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and a euro spent on a warship show up identically in gdp
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but they are not remotely equivalent in terms of whether a
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child lives the same is true of life expectancy mental health
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how safe people feel walking home how much free time they
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actually have all of these tend to move independently of economic growth a country can grow its output for years
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while daily life gets slowly worse if that growth isn't reaching ordinary people
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or isn't going into things that improve their lives now of course none of this means defense spending is wrong.
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Because a country that can't defend itself doesn't get to have quality of life debates for very long.
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But it does mean the economic question we've been focusing on
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only tells us part of what we need to know about defence spending.
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Asking whether rearmament grows the European economy is answerable.
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And the answer is a qualified yes in the short run and a fairly weak maybe over the long run.
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The better question probably is whether it makes life better for the people living there.
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Now we have already made an entire video on why Europe's economy stalled in the first place
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so we didn't want to repeat too much of that here, but if you're interested, you should be able to click to that on your screen now.
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Thanks for watching, mate.
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Bye.
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Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les
Deze video bevat 232 zinnen en 3117 woorden om na te spreken. Het gesproken deel duurt 15:31. De spreker praat snel, ongeveer 201 woorden per minuut, dus reken op verbonden en ingeslikte klanken. 82% van de woorden hoort bij de 3.000 meest gebruikte Engelse woorden; de rest kun je beter vooraf bekijken.
Belangrijke woorden in deze video
15 woorden uit de video die het leren waard zijn, met uitspraak en betekenis:
| Woord | Uitspraak | Betekenis |
|---|---|---|
| euro zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈjʊɹoʊ/ | euro |
| wage zelfstandig naamwoord | /weɪd͡ʒ/ | loon, salaris |
| roughly bijwoord | /ˈɹʌf.li/ | grofweg |
| output zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈaʊtpʊt/ | productie |
| fiscal bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /ˈfɪskəl/ | fiscaal |
| continent zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈkɑntɪnənt/ | werelddeel, continent |
| supplier zelfstandig naamwoord | /səˈplaɪə/ | leverancier |
| infrastructure zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/ | infrastructuur |
| economics zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˌiːkəˈnɒmɪks/ | economie |
| civilian zelfstandig naamwoord | /sɪˈvɪl.jən/ | burger |
| unemployment zelfstandig naamwoord | /ʌn.ɪmˈplɔɪ.mənt/ | werkloosheid |
| manufacturer zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˌmænjʊˈfæktʃəɹə/ | fabrikant |
| rebuild werkwoord | /ɹiːˈbɪld/ | heropbouwen, wederopbouwen |
| economist zelfstandig naamwoord | /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/ | econoom |
| badly bijwoord | /ˈbæd.li/ | slecht |
Phrasal verbs die je zult horen
| Woord | Betekenis |
|---|---|
| buy off werkwoord | afkopen, omkopen |
| come across werkwoord | overkomen |
| end up werkwoord | belanden, terechtkomen |
| show up werkwoord | tentoonstellen |
| slow down werkwoord | afremmen |
Grammatica in deze video
De structuren die de spreker het meest gebruikt, met de exacte woorden uit de video:
| Structuur | In de video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — iets dat eerder begon en nog bezig is | has been converting · have been doing · we've been focusing |
| Present perfect have/has + voltooid deelwoord — iets uit het verleden dat nu nog telt | haven't done · has been · has slowed |
| Lijdende vorm be + voltooid deelwoord — het gaat om wat er gebeurt, niet om wie het doet | would be treated · will be set · is sponsored |
| Betrekkelijke bijzinnen who / which + zin — extra informatie over een persoon of ding | GDP, which is · budget, which is · people who currently |
Uitspraak om op te letten
De spreker gebruikt 34 samentrekkingen en verkorte vormen, zoals isn't, doesn't, we've. Spreek ze kort uit, zoals je ze hoort.
- De “th”-klanken: theoretical /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/, threshold /ˈθɹɛʃ(h)oʊld/
- De klanken “sh” en “zh”: consumption /kənˈsʌmp.ʃən/, rush /ɹʌʃ/, unusual /ʌnˈjuːʒ(u)əl/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, sheet /ʃit/
- Lange woorden — let op de klemtoon: infrastructure /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/, economics /ˌiːkəˈnɒmɪks/, unemployment /ʌn.ɪmˈplɔɪ.mənt/, manufacturer /ˌmænjʊˈfæktʃəɹə/, portfolio /pɔːtˈfəʊ.liˌəʊ/
Zo oefen je met deze video
- Luister de hele video één keer zonder te spreken en noteer de woorden die je niet kent.
- Begin op 0,75× snelheid, spreek zin voor zin na en ga terug naar normale snelheid zodra het makkelijk gaat.
- Neem jezelf op en vergelijk met het origineel; let daarbij op woorden als euro, wage, roughly.
Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?
Shadowing is een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde taalleermethode die oorspronkelijk is ontwikkeld voor professionele tolkentraining en gepopulariseerd door polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. De methode is eenvoudig maar krachtig: je luistert naar native Engelse audio en herhaalt het onmiddellijk hardop — als een schaduw die de spreker volgt met slechts 1–2 seconden vertraging. In tegenstelling tot passief luisteren of grammaticadrills, dwingt shadowing je hersenen en mondspieren om echte spraakpatronen tegelijkertijd te verwerken en te reproduceren. Onderzoek toont aan dat het de uitspraaknauwkeurigheid, intonatie, ritme, verbonden spraak, luisterbegrip en spreekvaardigheid aanzienlijk verbetert — waardoor het een van de meest effectieve methoden is voor IELTS Speaking-voorbereiding en echte Engelse communicatie.