Making cars affordable for more people

As per the recent budget proposal, locally assembled vehicles up to engine capacity of 850cc are exempted from Federal Excise Duty, while the sales tax on the same was reduced from 17pc to 12.5pc. While reducing taxes on smaller vehicles to make them more affordable for the general public is a welcome move, limiting relief to vehicles of up to 850cc provides a very small range of option to choose from to the general public. The government should expand the scope of this relief for vehicles up till the engine capacity of 1050cc. This will help bring down prices of all small vehicles being locally assembled, while also extending benefit to multiple manufacturers. Therefore, competition in small vehicles manufacturers will be increased as consumers will have a greater range of vehicles to choose from as per their budget; these will include all vehicle categories ie passenger vehicles, light commercial vehicles and Multi-Purpose Vehicles.

(Adapted from “Making Automobiles Affordable For The Middle Class,” by Mohammad Shaaf Najib, published on June 16, 2021, by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics)

The Instagram price that teens pay

Anastasia Vlasova joined Instagram at 13 and eventually was spending three hours a day entranced by the seemingly perfect lives and bodies of the fitness influencers who posted on the app. About a year ago, she started seeing a therapist after developing an eating disorder — something she attributes to her time on the platform. When researchers inside Instagram began studying young users’ experiences on the app, they found that nearly a third of teenage girls said the platform made negative feelings they had about their bodies, internal documents show. For the past three years, Instagram owner Facebook has been conducting studies into how the app affects its millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company’s researchers found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls. Researchers concluded that some of the problems were specific to Instagram, and not social media more broadly. In public, Facebook has consistently played down the app’s negative effects on teens, and hasn’t made its research public or available to academics or lawmakers who have asked for it.

(Adapted from “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic For Teen Girls, Company Documents Show,” by Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, published on September 14, 2021, by The Wall Street Journal)

The cost of misogyny

“It seems as if the surest way to curse one’s nation is to subordinate its women,” say authors of a study that ranks 176 countries for misogyny. Researchers have found patriarchy to be a better predictor of violent instability than income, urbanisation or bad governance. The study, by Valerie Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen of Texas A&M and Brigham Young universities, estimates that 120 countries are still to some degree swayed by pre-modern attitudes to women that endanger political stability. If women are subject to autocracy and terror in their homes, society is also more vulnerable to these ills. A composite measure of archaic attitudes to women explained three-quarters of the variation in a country’s score on the Fragile States index compiled by the Fund for Peace. The researchers also found evidence that patriarchy and poverty go hand in hand.

(Adapted from “Societies that treat women badly are poorer and less stable,” published on September 11, 2021, by The Economist)

Just another virus?

We’re not there yet, but it’s time to start thinking about Covid as endemic. In Singapore, the Ministry of Health has started prioritising data on hospitalisations rather than infections. Israel is riding out a surge in new Covid cases without returning to lockdowns for the vaccinated. It’s hard to believe that an infection that’s killed more than 4.5m people could be thought of in such a routine way. But viruses throughout history have flipped between endemic and pandemic status with remarkable frequency. The moment we’ve beaten Covid won’t be when we eradicate it from the human population. It will be when we’ve reached a level of vaccinated and natural immunity where we no longer have reason to fear it. Covid is on its way to becoming just another virus. It’s time to remind ourselves that, for those who’ve been inoculated, the coronavirus is no longer the imminent threat it was 18 months ago.

(Adapted from “Covid Is on Its Way to Becoming Just Another Virus,” by David Fickling, published on September 13, 2021, by Bloomberg Opinion)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, September 20th, 2021