PETERNOMICS The following collection of articles were written by Lower Sixth pupils studying A-Level Economics2020 and/or Business at St Peter’s School. The following collection of articles were written by Lower Sixth pupils studying A-Level Economics and/or Business at St Peter’s School. ARTICLE AUTHOR PAGE AUTONOMOUS CARS AND THE LAW Kitty Black 3 TAX AVOIDANCE VS TAX EVASION James Brent 4 PARKS IN CITIES Polina Andreeva 5 THE 2020 AUSTRALIAN BUSHFIRES Lewis Jefferson 6 PRICE FLUCTUATIONS IN AGRICULTURAL MARKETS George Pears 7 IS GLOBALISATION REVERSIBLE? Harry Shi 8 THE VALUE OF MODERN MONEY James Hatfield 10 WHY IS THE HOUSING MARKET IMPORTANT TO THE ECONOMY? Tudor Maude 11 THE UK CAR INDUSTRY – WHAT WENT WRONG? Charlie Black 12 WHY THE MONEY INVOLVED IN FOOTBALL HAS CHANGED THE GAME Josh Gath 13 FINANCIAL CRISIS VS COVID 19 Olly Tomalin 14 THE GLOBAL HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY Michael Brown 15 THE EFFECT OF THE CORONAVIRUS ON UK FIRMS Isaac Burley 16 THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON FINANCE IN FOOTBALL Harvey Gration 17 IMPACTS OF COVID-19 ON THE TRAVEL INDUSTRY Olly McBeath 19 CHILD POVERTY Ellie Thistlewaite 20 HOW CONTAINERISATION TRANSFORMED GLOBAL TRADE Antonia Ryan-Briscoe 21 BOEING'S POTENTIAL DOWNFALL James Hamilton 22 THE DEATH OF THE UK HIGH STREET Harry Lister 23 WHO WILL WIN THE STREAMING WAR? Hugo Hughes 24 THE ANTARCTIC TREATY Jodie Leon 25 THE STRUGGLES OF THE FARMING INDUSTRY Charlie Bramley 26 THE UK PROPERTY MARKET Ben Webster 27 THE UK MACROECONOMY Jimmy Dawson 28 WILL SARACENS RECOVER FROM THE SALARY CAP SCANDAL? Joe Baker 29 HOW DOES THE FILM INDUSTRY IMPACT ECONOMIC GROWTH? Joe Lawrence 30 IS COMPANY CULTURE A MYTH? Tom Hollinrake 31 THE RISE OF THE GAMING INDUSTRY Tom Meere 32 FLYING INTO TURBULENCE Angel Norza 33 CORONAVIRUS AND INEQUALITY IN THE US Issy Greenwood 34 1 ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN PLANNING Jimmy Dawson 35 FREIGHT CAPABILITY IN CHINA Christine Zhang 36 THE SMARTPHONE INDUSTRY Tommy Hudson 37 THE USE OF MATHEMATICS IN ECONOMICS Alex Xiong 38 THE FASHION INDUSTRY IN CRISIS Sophie Clarke 39 CORONAVIRUS AND ITS IMPACT ON ONLINE BUSINESS Banky Claudius-Cole 40 COVID 19 AND GLOBALISATION Jazz Nizon 41 IS GDP THE BEST WAY TO MEASURE GLOBAL PROSPERITY? Joshy Bennison 42 BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH Matt Ng 43 STOCK MARKET INVESTMENT Bella Hollinrake 44 WHAT IS A TAX HAVEN? Joe Padgett 45 THE EFFECT OF COVID-19 ON RUGBY Archie Pope 46 2 AUTONOMOUS CARS AND THE LAW The autonomous car industry is growing in attention rapidly across the world and is an area of huge technological change. Whilst to the average person it sounds like a great idea- cars that you don’t have to drive, the industry has several difficult legal questions that need answering first. The biggest one being the issue of liability - who is responsible for an autonomous car that causes an accident?. As there are more potential parties to a claim, including the person sitting the car, the owner of the car, the manufacturer, the software supplier or the person who wrote the software code and so on (and insurance companies), the question of who is responsible for accidents in these cars becomes a much more complex one that businesses need to find an answer to. When it comes to injury claims from a regular car crash, determining which party is at fault is already difficult, but the majority of the time can be solved with CCTV cameras, witnesses etc. However when it comes to autonomous cars there is no clear- cut definition of who the driver is, which makes it more difficult to decide who is responsible for the accident. In most self-driving cars without steering wheels in use the software will be the key decision maker, therefore it would make sense for the liability to be held with the manufacturer or software provider. However, what do you decide when some automated cars have steering wheels in them so that at any time the driver can step in to control the car? The whole point of the autonomous car is that passengers don’t have to be fully concentrated on the roads, therefore in a situation where they are needed to step in it is likely that they could be distracted and act too late to prevent the accident. Will the driver or manufacturer be responsible in such situations? Without precise laws and regulations concerning safety and liability, self-driving cars are less likely to find acceptance among the general population. There are still so many questions that the industry needs to answer such as who will pay for insurance, what product liability regulations are involved and whose fault the accident is. A second difficult area in relation to product liability and autonomous vehicles is the issue of consumer expectation. A defective product is described by the Consumer Protection Act as one where the safety of the product is not what the consumer expected. This is difficult when applied to the autonomous vehicle because some customers may have unrealistic expectations in terms of what the technology is capable of and could therefore attempt to claim that the purpose for which the product was marketed was not met. The automated car industry has a long way to go before becoming commonplace on the street. They will have to cross numerous hurdles to gain trust and acceptance of the public. For people in the business of designing or making these cars and the parts for them, it is a huge issue which will determine the success of the technology and how quickly it can be adopted and developed further. 3 TAX AVOIDANCE VS TAX EVASION Tax avoidance is the bending of the rules of a tax system in order to gain a tax advantage that Parliament did not intend when making those rules. These methods often involve contrived transactions solely with the purpose of producing this advantage. These methods involve operating within the details of the law but not within the intended purpose of the law. Moving to another country with a lower income tax such as Guernsey which has a flat rate tax of 20% in order to pay less tax which would apply to all those earning £50,001 or more since in the UK you would be subject to paying 40% of your income or more after that is tax avoidance and is perfectly legal. Tax avoidance could be considered a bad thing because the government would be able to increase its income with the money that has avoided taxation. Also most people who would be interested in avoiding taxes are those with higher incomes seeing as they have more money to lose and also have more money to spend saving it so since many people aim to tax the wealthy at a greater amount in order to reduce inequality tax avoidance is a bad thing. This begs the question: why is tax avoidance legal at all? Primarily this is because since tax avoidance involves bending the rules and not breaking them and since technically this is within the law the fault lies with the legislation approved by government and not with those exploiting it as if the law was watertight tax avoidance would be impossible. Secondly tightening tax avoidance laws further could scare firms and wealthy individuals in the UK away so keeping tax avoidance legal helps keep businesses in the UK where they might not be paying as much tax as they could but that is still better than no revenue at all which they would get if these firms and individuals moved overseas. Tax evasion is illegal underpayment or evasion of payment of taxes. This means that firms or individuals are not paying the amount of tax that is owed. An example of tax evasion is not reporting all of your income which means that you are paying less tax than you should be. Tax evasion is a criminal offence that can lead to prison sentences and fines. Companies who have evaded taxes will also be labelled which would damage their reputation and could lead to a fall in share prices. Differentiating between the two is very important seeing as one of the is a criminal offense and in some cases finding the distinction of the two can be difficult. This is because some cases of tax avoidance have been labelled as aggressive when they are very large and at that point can be questioned in court. When this happens the result is often just the paying back of the taxes that would have been owed devoid of the tax avoidance because it is very difficult for persecutors to provide further penalties for something initially defined as avoidance and not evasion due to the broad interpretation of “bending” the rules. However, sometimes in extreme cases with a wide base of support the courts have been able to shift a case of aggressive tax avoidance into the grounds of tax evasion at which point they are able to enact further penalties than just the repayment of taxes. 4 PARKS IN CITIES There is no doubt that parks are an integral part of the UK culture. The idea of creating of public green spaces firstly arose in the Victorian era and immediately became popular among the Britons. But why to have such large territories, often in profitable locations, dedicated to parks? To begin with, parks boost local economies and exert positive effect to the property prices by attracting new residents. Higher property prices create economic value and raise government tax revenues. Among the importance of closeness of schools and office, public spaces are a significant factor when people are choosing a new neighborhood.