2026年6月 第1套 自测练习

Children's use of social media is a problem. That doesn't mean it should be stopped. While younger children should not be on platforms where 13 is the minimum age, it is neither practical nor desirable to imagine a world in which teenagers are prevented from accessing the platforms and messaging systems that the adults around them use to organise their lives. But the pleasure and stimulation that people of all ages find on their screens and smartphones must not blind us to the harm that spending time in this way can cause. The finding that the alarmingly high rate of depression in British teenage girls is closely correlated to time spent on social media is extremely concerning. Research found that two in five girls are on social media for at least three hours a day —— with half as many boys engaged to the same extent. More than a third of depressed girls have experienced online harassment. About half of affected girls suffered disrupted sleep, compared with 20% of depressed boys. Although the research does not prove that social media causes depression, the importance of the finding that there is a connection should not be underestimated. Schools have done important work in communicating key messages about the risks of online abuse. But when it comes to broader questions about "screen time", many professionals as well as parents are confused and uncertain. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, wants official guidelines on time and age limits. This idea has the virtue of simplicity, though some experts question its effects and call for a greater degree of differentiation, arguing that time online by itself is not a bad thing and it all depends on what you are doing. Also due this year is information commissioner Elizabeth Denham's Age Appropriate Design Code, covering the use of children's personal data. Both initiatives are welcome. But the government is playing catch-up. Statutory regulation of the digital media giants is long overdue. The failure to protect children from data harvesting and targeted advertising thus far is as shocking as the lack of concern shown by the companies themselves with regard to children's psychological health. Of course, social media companies are not the source of all our ills, and can offer a too-easy target for politicians keen to divert attention from inadequately resourced schools and health services. There are other reasons for the rising incidence of depression in young people, with increasing pressure to succeed in education and in life more broadly —— to be famous, beautiful, rich —— often cited as a source of unhappiness or anxiety which can, if aggravated by other factors, and not managed, tip into ill health. Safeguarding means more than the avoidance of physical threat.

About a decade ago, the G-20, a forum of the world's biggest economies, agreed to crack down on multinational corporations' abusive use of tax havens. This resulted in a plan that aimed to curb practices that shielded a large chunk of corporate profits from tax authorities. But, instead of reining in the use of tax havens —— countries such as the Bahamas and Cayman Islands with very low or no effective tax rates —— the problem has only gotten worse. In a new study, we measured the excessive profits reported in tax havens that cannot be explained by ordinary economic activity such as employees, factories and research in that country. Our findings show a striking pattern of artificial shifting of paper profits to tax havens by corporations, which has been relentless since the 1980s. We found that the world's biggest multinational businesses shifted 37% of the profits —— $969 billion —— they earned in other countries to tax havens in 2019. The figure was less than 2% in the 1970s. The main reasons for the large increase were the growth of the tax avoidance industry in the 1980s and U. S. policies that made it easier to shift profits from high-tax countries to tax havens. We estimate that the amount of corporate taxes lost as a result reached 10% of total corporate revenue in 2019, up from less than 0.1% in the 1970s. In 2019, the total government tax loss globally was $250 billion. U. S. multinational corporations alone accounted for about half of that, followed by the U. K. and Germany. How do policymakers fix this? So far, the world as a whole has been trying to solve this problem by cutting or scrapping corporate taxes in a very gradual way. In the past 40 years, the global effective corporate tax rate has fallen from 23% to 17%. At the same time, governments have relied more heavily on consumption taxes. But the root cause of profit-shifting is the incentives involved, such as generous or lenient corporate tax rates in other countries. If countries could agree on a global minimum corporate tax rate of, say, 20%, the problem of profit-shifting would largely disappear, as tax havens would simply cease to exist. This type of mechanism is exactly what more than 130 countries signed onto in 2021, with implementation of a 15% minimum tax set to begin soon in the EU, U. K., Japan, Indonesia and many other countries. The U. S. has notably not been able to pass this legislation. Our research suggests implementing this type of tax reform is necessary in reversing the shift of ever-greater amounts of corporate profits to tax havens —— instead of being taxed by the governments where they operate and create value.