New York City recently produced a report on the gender price differential in some consumer goods. The so-called Pink Tax. It turns out, women pay more than men for certain goods, like clothes and home health products and personal care products. The study found that women pay as much as 13 percent more for some categories of products.
Some economists say this is a good thing: it creates more variety in the market and enables prices to be lower for some things. But others argue those markets are skewed, that advertising and marketing may have manipulated consumers to the point that those markets need to be rebalanced.
Today on The Indicator, we check out the pink tax for ourselves.
Planet Money: Episode 755: The Phone At The End Of The World
In the late 2000s, Argentina was facing a slew of economic problems. The president was a charismatic populist with bold plans and the will to act. One of the things then-President Cristina Kirchner wanted to tackle: unemployment. So she set out to create manufacturing jobs in Argentina.
She made a rule in 2010 that if a company wanted to sell things in Argentina, they needed to make things in Argentina.
Some companies didn’t play ball. Even though Argentina was a big and lucrative market, Apple said, ‘we’ll just sit this one out, we just won’t sell iPhones in Argentina at all.’ Other companies, though, decided to give it a try — to set up entirely new production operations within Argentina. One of them was the company that made Blackberry, the most popular phone in the country at the time. Making the high tech phones would mean good jobs for thousands of people.
President Kirchner didn’t just demand the phones were made in Argentina. She wanted the phones made in a very particular place in Argentina, all the way at the southernmost tip of the country. The government decided that is where she said the jobs should be created.
Tierra del Fuego is home to penguins, grey skies and brutal winds. It’s the last stop for ships before making the final leg to Antarctica.
Today on the show, how a town at the ends of the earth wound up making Blackberry phones, and what happened to when a charismatic president launched a big plan to create jobs and boost manufacturing.
Planet Money: Episode 761: The Bank War
Banks and governments have been fighting each other for hundreds of years, but never more dramatically than during the showdown between President Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Second Bank of the United States.
Jackson was a populist, who rode to victory on promises to wrest control of the country from the East Coast elite. He was angry at the power structure, and he was furious at the banks. To him, they were the phantom controllers of the economy, issuing spurious scripts that often vanished with the banks when they collapsed.
Biddle was pretty much the opposite of Jackson, raised in the one of the country’s earliest aristocratic families. He was a poetical kid and a classics scholar, who started Princeton when he was 17. He believed in banks and he believed that a well run bank would serve the nation and create stability.
In the 1830s their two views of the nation collided, with disastrous and long-ranging results.
Phillipines Tax Comissioner goes after Famous over Tax Avoidance
Millions of tax cheats never get caught. And the IRS seems powerless to stop them.
This isn’t just a problem in the U.S. American taxpayers are Dudley Do-Rights compared to people in some other countries. On today’s show, we head to some of the cheating-est places on earth to bring you tales from some of the roughest, toughest tax collectors around. These guys have tricks, tax collector mind-games, that they play to get people to do the right thing.
Bureau of Internal Revenue Commissioner Kim Henares poses with her score following target practice in a firing range at suburban Mandaluyong city
In the Phillipines, they made the Tax Commissioner famous.
Britain: You are currently in the very small minority that have not paid us yet.