Petroleum Profit Tax and Nigeria Economic Development

Petroleum Profit Tax is a major source of revenue for the Federal Government of Nigeria to meet its statutory obligations of ensuring the economic development of Nigeria. It assists the government to achieve the country’s macroeconomic objective in the areas of fiscal and monetary policies.However,it has been observed that non-provision of corporate social responsibilities in the communities where there is extraction of crude oil result into constant destruction of production installations, and hindrance to production; tax avoidance and evasion d poor tax administration, and weak fiscal policy have been negating the increase in tax income generated. The main objective of this paper is to assess the relationship between petroleum profit tax and economic development of Nigeria for the enhancement of the welfare of the citizens. Primary and secondary data were used to collect the research data, while chi-square and multiple regression statistical models were used to analyze the results of the field work. The findings reveal that there is a very strong relationship between petroleum profit tax and economic development of Nigeria, tax avoidance and evasion are major hindrance to income growth in this sector, poor tax administration is a problem to effectiveness and efficiency of this source of income, and lack of corporate social responsibilities is causing unrest in the crude oil production zone. The paper recommends the need for the government to make judicious use income generated for the benefits of Nigerians, and among others the need for tax reforms to address the issue of tax evasion and avoidance

E-government in the making: socio-economic development in the Akshaya project

This paper discusses the Akshaya E-Government project. The paper uses general concepts borrowed from actor network theory to discuss the ongoing negotiation that shapes E-Government projects. We aim at shedding light on the importance of the dynamic interactions that shape the impact of ICT on government polices. In particular, we show that the nature of the service delivered and the socioeconomical development supported by the project are constantly shaped by the negotiation that occurs among the different actors involved and the consequent changes the project itself experiences. We therefore suggest to study e-Government in its making and not as results of planned action and sequential evolutionary phases

SOFTWARE ENTREPRENEURSHIP: KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS AND PERFORMANCE OF SOFTWARE VENTURES IN CHINA AND RUSSIA

This study examines the impact of entrepreneurs’ network structure and knowledge homogeneity/heterogeneity of their network members on product development, and revenue growth of software ventures in China and Russia. The empirical data are composed of structured interviews with 159 software entrepreneurs in Beijing and Moscow. The study found that structural holes and knowledge heterogeneity affect positively product diversity in interactive ways. The study also found that knowledge homogeneity accelerates product development. Product development speed enhances revenue growth in the long term. However, the combination of speed with dense and homogeneous networks harms revenue growth over time. The effects of structural holes and knowledge heterogeneity on product diversity and revenue growth over time are more salient in Russia due to the unique institutional, social, and cultural conditions present in the country.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40137/3/wp751.pd

Enabling Privacy-preserving Auctions in Big Data

We study how to enable auctions in the big data context to solve many upcoming data-based decision problems in the near future. We consider the characteristics of the big data including, but not limited to, velocity, volume, variety, and veracity, and we believe any auction mechanism design in the future should take the following factors into consideration: 1) generality (variety); 2) efficiency and scalability (velocity and volume); 3) truthfulness and verifiability (veracity). In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving construction for auction mechanism design in the big data, which prevents adversaries from learning unnecessary information except those implied in the valid output of the auction. More specifically, we considered one of the most general form of the auction (to deal with the variety), and greatly improved the the efficiency and scalability by approximating the NP-hard problems and avoiding the design based on garbled circuits (to deal with velocity and volume), and finally prevented stakeholders from lying to each other for their own benefit (to deal with the veracity). We achieve these by introducing a novel privacy-preserving winner determination algorithm and a novel payment mechanism. Additionally, we further employ a blind signature scheme as a building block to let bidders verify the authenticity of their payment reported by the auctioneer. The comparison with peer work shows that we improve the asymptotic performance of peer works' overhead from the exponential growth to a linear growth and from linear growth to a logarithmic growth, which greatly improves the scalability