For three years, cigarettes in Pakistan kept getting more affordable, tax rates hadn't moved since 2019, while incomes and prices drifted upward around them. That changed in February 2023, when the government raised excise duty by over 150% in a single move, the largest one-time hike on record. Affordability reversed overnight: buying 2,000 cigarettes went from costing 3% of per capita income to 6.2%, more than doubling in a matter of months. The behavioral response tracks the theory closely. SPDC's own research on an earlier price increase found that 29% of smokers cut back and 12.8% quit or seriously considered quitting once cigarettes got more expensive, and the national numbers bear that pattern out: cigarette smoking fell from 12.4% of adults in 2014 to 9.8% in 2024, driven mostly by men, whose smoking rate dropped from 22.2% to 15.8%. Price, not persuasion, appears to be doing the heaviest lifting in Pakistan's tobacco control story, which is exactly why sustaining the tax rate matters more than any single hike. @GallupPak x @MacroPakistani

Pakistan has nearly doubled its annual PhD output since 2018, pushing total production past 40,000 graduates, even as the labour market gives almost nothing back for it. A worker with 16+ years of schooling earns just 1.86 times what an uneducated worker makes, less than half of India's 4.18x return on the same comparison. Pakistan's wage curve trails India's by almost a full education stage at every point, meaning the incentive to finish school, let alone pursue a doctorate, is weak to begin with. The credential pipeline is expanding fastest at the exact moment the market is signalling that credentials barely matter, a mismatch that points to an absorption problem. @GallupPak x @MacroPakistani