Taxation Futures for Sustainable Mobility: final report to the ESRC

The existing transport tax and charging regime has stimulated limited behavioural change and has been politically problematic (as demonstrated by the September 2000 fuel duty protests). This project synthesised a range of research that has explored ways in which road user charging could replace the present regime based on taxing fuels and car ownership. In 2002, when this project was proposed, this was a fringe transport policy issue. Throughout 2003 the subject achieved a sudden prominence, with a government working party being established to explore the possibility of long-term area-wide road user charging. A tax regime change towards a car road user charge for cars has occurred, or is being considered, in societies as contrasting as Oregon State in the USA, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK, reflecting a range of policy considerations. For the UK, these include: the ongoing failure of transport policy measures to achieve adequate cuts in congestion and emissions; the success of the London Congestion Charge; the rise in the cost of transport policy interventions; the reduction in Treasury income of eco-reforms to the current tax regime; and the difficulties of, and equity issues relating to, taxing fuel in a future multi-fuel transport sector. The project developed tax change scenarios in conjunction with the project's user group (including policymakers, NGOs and researchers). Five scenarios were modelled using an adaptation of the Dutch Mobility Explorer program. An 'opt-in' transitional policy mechanism involved replacing VED with a small flat-rate kilometre charge for cars of 0.77 p/km. The model suggested it would have little policy impact, but could be used to familiarise car drivers with the concept of a distance charge. A fiscally neutral scenario involved the replacement of VED and Fuel Duty with a banded kilometre charge for cars of between 2.3 and 8.5 p/km (varied by the environmental performance of the vehicle type). This induced little behaviour change, reducing car driver mobility by only 4%. A further scenario, restored the tax revenues lost from post-2000 tax changes, generating an additional £3 billion or £6b per annum. These reduced car driver mobility by 9% - 14%, and total CO2 emissions were predicted to drop by 6% - 9% by 2015, compared to the base scenario. The type of change involved in the revenue-raising scenarios is significant. There would be only a small increase in the use of public transport, with the predominant response being the better utilisation of cars with higher occupancy and more linking of trips to cut distances driven. The project results suggest that road user charging may deliver more revenue stability than fuel taxation. However, clarity is needed over the policy goals – congestion reduction, emission reduction, revenue stability – for a national road user charge, because the goals are not necessarily complementary. It should also be emphasised that a change of tax regime would not remove the need the hard political decisions in this area

From cities to productivity and growth in developing countries

This paper reviews the evidence about the effects of urbanisation and cities on productivity and economic growth in developing countries using a consistent theoretical framework. Just like in developed economies, there is strong evidence that cities in developing countries bolster productive efficiency. Regarding whether cities promote self-sustained growth, the evidence is suggestive but ultimately inconclusive. These findings imply that the traditional agenda of aiming to raise within-city efficiency should be continued. Furthermore, reducing the obstacles to the reallocation of factors and activities, and more generally promoting the movement of human capital and goods across cities may have significant positive dynamic effects as well static ones.Cities in developing countries, growth, urbanisation

Visual analytics of flight trajectories for uncovering decision making strategies

In air traffic management and control, movement data describing actual and planned flights are used for planning, monitoring and post-operation analysis purposes with the goal of increased efficient utilization of air space capacities (in terms of delay reduction or flight efficiency), without compromising the safety of passengers and cargo, nor timeliness of flights. From flight data, it is possible to extract valuable information concerning preferences and decision making of airlines (e.g. route choice) and air traffic managers and controllers (e.g. flight rerouting or optimizing flight times), features whose understanding is intended as a key driver for bringing operational performance benefits. In this paper, we propose a suite of visual analytics techniques for supporting assessment of flight data quality and data analysis workflows centred on revealing decision making preferences

Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) for Future Internet Position Paper: System Functions, Capabilities and Requirements

Future Internet (FI) research and development threads have recently been gaining momentum all over the world and as such the international race to create a new generation Internet is in full swing: GENI, Asia Future Internet, Future Internet Forum Korea, European Union Future Internet Assembly (FIA). This is a position paper identifying the research orientation with a time horizon of 10 years, together with the key challenges for the capabilities in the Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) part of the Future Internet (FI) allowing for parallel and federated Internet(s)

Gravity model explained by the radiation model on a population landscape

Understanding the mechanisms behind human mobility patterns is crucial to improve our ability to optimize and predict traffic flows. Two representative mobility models, i.e., radiation and gravity models, have been extensively compared to each other against various empirical data sets, while their fundamental relation is far from being fully understood. In order to study such a relation, we first model the heterogeneous population landscape by generating a fractal geometry of sites and then by assigning to each site a population independently drawn from a power-law distribution. Then the radiation model on this population landscape, which we call the radiation-on-landscape (RoL) model, is compared to the gravity model to derive the distance exponent in the gravity model in terms of the properties of the population landscape, which is confirmed by the numerical simulations. Consequently, we provide a possible explanation for the origin of the distance exponent in terms of the properties of the heterogeneous population landscape, enabling us to better understand mobility patterns constrained by the travel distance.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

(Post-)Materialist Attitudes and the Mix of Capital and Labour Taxation

Social values shape policy outcomes. We examine the role of postmaterialism, a widely used concept in the social sciences, for the mix of capital and labour taxation chosen by a society. Following political scientist Inglehart, we define the degree of postmaterialism as the relative importance which individuals or a society as a whole ascribe to non-material values over material things. We incorporate this notion into a simple tax model for a small open economy. We show that a greater emphasis on immaterial values will lower the ratio of capital to labour taxes. Subsequently, we test our theoretical results empirically, using a panel data set comprising 17 OECD countries over the period 1981-2000. Proxies for the degree of postmaterialism are developed from the World Values Surveys. Their impact on the tax mix is highly significant and goes into the theoretically predicted direction.culture economics, social values, postmaterialism, taxation

Between North and South: The EU-ACP Migration Relationship

Before the turn of the century, international migration had an extremely low profile on the global development agenda. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), for example, make no mention at all of international migration. Although a number of studies have attempted to “mainstream” migration into the MDGs after the fact, it is still largely ignored in official assessments of progress made towards them (Usher, 2005; Crush and Frayne 2007; Skeldon, 2008). According to the United Nations (UN), the silence surrounding migration in the MDGs was because it was too divisive and sensitive an issue between developed and developing countries (United Nations Population Fund [UNFPA], 2005). At the time, cooperation between North and South on the governance of migration more broadly seemed highly unlikely. Nation states in the North increasingly believed that their territorial sovereignty was under threat from irregular migration from the South, and states in the South saw their development prospects undermined by a crippling “brain drain” to the North. Repeated efforts by the UN to convene an international conference on migration in the late 1990s were unsuccessful. Since 2000, however, international migration has moved to the top of the global governance agenda and a whole range of bilateral and multilateral partnerships have taken shape (Koser, 2010; Newland, 2010; Betts, 2011; Hansen, Koehler and Money, 2011; Koslowski, 2011; Kunz, Lavenex and Pannizon, 2011). This process began with various initiatives within the UN, notably the 2003 Doyle Report to Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his appointment of a special rapporteur on migration and development. Outside the UN, discussions about international migration gathered momentum with the appointment of the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) and the first UN High Level Dialogue (HLD) on International Migration and Development in 2006 (GCIM, 2005; UN, 2006). In 2007, the first meeting of the new Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) was convened in Brussels. This was followed by annual meetings in the Philippines in 2008; Greece in 2009; Mexico in 2010; Switzerland in 2011; and Mauritius in 2012. The GFMD is a state‐led, voluntary, non‐binding consultative process open to all member states and observer states of the UN (Omelianuk, 2008; 2012; Newland, 2012). In 2009, the major UN agencies, plus the International Organization for Migration (IOM), combined to form the Global Migration Group (GMG) with a brief to “promote the wider application of all relevant international and regional instruments and norms relating to migration, and to encourage the adoption of more coherent, comprehensive and better coordinated approaches to the issue of international migration” (GMG, 2012). In 2010, the GMG issued a handbook for states with recommendations on how to mainstream migration into their development planning and vice-versa (GMG, 2010). Another notable feature of the “new optimism” around international migration is the growth of cooperation on the issue within and between regional blocs of states. Regional consultative processes (RCPs) on migration, for example, now exist in many parts of the globe (Thouez and Channac, 2006; Hansen, 2010). While the original focus of many RCPs was migration management, issues of migration and development grew increasingly on their agendas. In Southern Africa, for example, the Migration Dialogue for Southern Africa (MIDSA) was founded by IOM and SAMP as a non-binding consultative forum for Southern African Development Community (SADC) states in 2002 and meets on an annual basis. Originally focussed on regional cooperation in managed migration, the MIDSA agenda has been increasingly shaped by migration and development issues. In addition to the RCPs, geographically dispersed blocs of states also moved migration and development higher on their lists of priorities: these include the Commonwealth, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union (AU) and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States (AU, 2006a; AU, 2006b; ACP, 2010; Gagnon and Khoudour- Castéras, 2011; de Boeck, 2012; Melde, 2012; OECD, 2012; Ramphal Institute, 2012). The most recent trend is the emergence of increased dialogue and cooperation on international migration between blocs of states. The European Union (EU) has been a central player in many of these initiatives. Following the adoption of its Global Approach to Migration (GAM) in 2005, the EU pursued “mobility partnerships” with major migrant-sending regions and countries (Parkes, 2009; Devisscher, 2011; Reslow, 2012). In relation to Africa, the Euro-African Ministerial Conference on Migration and Development, held in Rabat, Morocco in July 2006, was followed by the Joint EU-AU Declaration on Migration and Development in Tripoli, Libya in November that year (see: www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/47fdfb010.html) One of the outcomes of the declaration is the recent Africa-EU Partnership on Migration, Mobility and Employment (MME). The MME partnership commits the parties to dialogue on a broad range of issues, including diasporas; remittances; brain drain; migrant rights; the social consequences of migration; regular, circular and irregular migration; visa issues; smuggling and trafficking of migrants; readmission and return; refugee protection; the mobility of students; and harmonization processes. The partnership’s current 12-point action plan includes the establishment of an African Institute for Remittances in Addis Ababa, the implementation of the Ouagadougou Action Plan to Combat Trafficking in Human Beings and the Diaspora Outreach Initiative. In the space of a decade, how and why has migration shifted from being an issue that was of marginal interest on the international development agenda to one that is increasingly at its centre? How has one of the most contentious North-South issues of the 1990s become the focus of so much bilateral and multilateral dialogue and cooperation between them? The first section of this paper provides a possible answer to these questions, which provides a context for understanding the nature of cooperation between the EU and ACP Group of States on international migration governance

Modelling transport energy demand : a socio-technical approach

Peer reviewedPostprin

Techno-economic viability of integrating satellite communication in 4G networks to bridge the broadband digital divide

Bridging the broadband digital divide between urban and rural areas in Europe is one of the main targets of the Digital Agenda for Europe. Though many technological options are proposed in literature, satellite communication has been identified as the only possible solution for the most rural areas, due to its global coverage. However, deploying an end-to-end satellite solution might, in some cases, not be cost-effective. The aim of this study is to give insights into the economic effectiveness of integrating satellite communications into 4G networks in order to connect the most rural areas (also referred to as white areas) in Europe. To this end, this paper proposes a converged solution that combines satellite communication as a backhaul network with 4G as a fronthaul network to bring enhanced broadband connectivity to European rural areas, along with a techno-economic model to analyse the economic viability of this integration. The model is based on a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model for 5 years, taking into account both capital and operational expenditures, and aims to calculate the TCO as well as the Average Cost Per User (ACPU) for the studied scenarios. We evaluate the suggested model by simulating a hypothetical use case for two scenarios. The first scenario is based on a radio access network connecting to the 4G core network via a satellite link. Results for this scenario show high operational costs. In order to reduce these costs, we propose a second scenario, consisting of caching the popular content on the edge to reduce the traffic carried over the satellite link. This scenario demonstrates a significant operational cost decrease (more than 60%), which also means a significant ACPU decrease. We evaluate the robustness of the results by simulating for a range of population densities, hereby also providing an indication of the economic viability of our proposed solution across a wider range of areas