[Current Affairs] October 23,2020 Top Pakistan Current Affairs for Entry Test Preparation

3. Pakistan’s first transgender lawyer tells her story

28-year-old Nisha Rao is reportedly Pakistan’s first transgender lawyer. She is currently based in Karachi, but originally from Lahore. After completing her matriculation exam, she fled to Karachi to escape her family. During her first month and a half in Karachi, she lived at her friend’s teacher’s house and started begging to make some money since the teacher was also poor. Rao ended up attending Karachi University and graduated with a degree in International Relations. She went on to get her law degree from Sindh Muslim Law College in 2018. Rao continued to beg while studying law, and used that money to pay her way through law college. Now, she fights cases involving other transgender people, and has handled more than 50 cases so far.

5. An unexpected current-account surplus

Pakistan’s current account balance showed a surplus for the third month in a row. However, even though September experienced a current account surplus of $73 million, it was still lower than the $211 million surplus in August. The lower surplus in September is due to an increase in imports (e.g. sugar, wheat, industrial raw material), which caused a wider trade deficit. Economists actually predicted a deficit instead of a surplus in September, since Pakistan still has higher imports than exports. However, according to the central bank, the rise in remittances (i.e. payments) from overseas Pakistanis, plus a month-on-month increase in exports, likely drove the current account surplus last month.

• Backstory: The total surplus for the first quarter of the current fiscal year is $792 million, compared to the $1,492 million (i.e. $1,492,000,000) deficit during the same time last year. This is the first quarterly surplus in more than five years.

• Here’s a quick refresher on what exactly a ‘current account surplus’ and ‘trade deficit’ mean: A country’s current account balance has a ‘surplus’ when it has more exports than imports. Trade balance, or the difference between a country’s imports and exports, has the biggest impact on a country’s current account balance. If the value of a country’s imports is greater than the value of its exports, that indicates a trade deficit. If the value of a country’s exports is greater than the value of its imports, that’s a trade surplus.