National innovation systems, developing countries, and the role of intermediaries: a critical review of the literature

Developed over the past three decades, the national innovation system concept (NIS) has been widely used by both scholars and policy makers to explain how interactions between a set of distinct, nationally bounded institutions supports and facilitates technological change and the emergence and diffusion of new innovations. This concept provides a framework by which developing countries can adopt for purposes of catching up. Initially conceived on structures and interactions identified in economically advanced countries, the application of the NIS concept to developing countries has been gradual and has coincided – in the NIS literature – with a move away from overly macro-interpretations to an emphasis on micro-level interactions and processes, with much of this work questioning the nation state as the most appropriate level of analysis, as well as the emergence of certain intermediary actors thought to facilitate knowledge exchange between actors and institutions. This paper reviews the NIS literature chronologically, showing how this shift in emphasis has diminished somewhat the importance of both institutions, particularly governments, and the process of institutional capacity building. In doing so, the paper suggests that more recent literature on intermediaries such as industry associations may offer valuable insights to how institutional capacity building occurs and how it might be directed, particularly in the context of developing countries where governance capacities are often lacking, contributing to less effective innovation systems, stagnant economies, and unequal development

Advanced document data extraction techniques to improve supply chain performance

In this thesis, a novel machine learning technique to extract text-based information from scanned images has been developed. This information extraction is performed in the context of scanned invoices and bills used in financial transactions. These financial transactions contain a considerable amount of data that must be extracted, refined, and stored digitally before it can be used for analysis. Converting this data into a digital format is often a time-consuming process. Automation and data optimisation show promise as methods for reducing the time required and the cost of Supply Chain Management (SCM) processes, especially Supplier Invoice Management (SIM), Financial Supply Chain Management (FSCM) and Supply Chain procurement processes. This thesis uses a cross-disciplinary approach involving Computer Science and Operational Management to explore the benefit of automated invoice data extraction in business and its impact on SCM. The study adopts a multimethod approach based on empirical research, surveys, and interviews performed on selected companies.The expert system developed in this thesis focuses on two distinct areas of research: Text/Object Detection and Text Extraction. For Text/Object Detection, the Faster R-CNN model was analysed. While this model yields outstanding results in terms of object detection, it is limited by poor performance when image quality is low. The Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model is proposed in response to this limitation. The GAN model is a generator network that is implemented with the help of the Faster R-CNN model and a discriminator that relies on PatchGAN. The output of the GAN model is text data with bonding boxes. For text extraction from the bounding box, a novel data extraction framework consisting of various processes including XML processing in case of existing OCR engine, bounding box pre-processing, text clean up, OCR error correction, spell check, type check, pattern-based matching, and finally, a learning mechanism for automatizing future data extraction was designed. Whichever fields the system can extract successfully are provided in key-value format.The efficiency of the proposed system was validated using existing datasets such as SROIE and VATI. Real-time data was validated using invoices that were collected by two companies that provide invoice automation services in various countries. Currently, these scanned invoices are sent to an OCR system such as OmniPage, Tesseract, or ABBYY FRE to extract text blocks and later, a rule-based engine is used to extract relevant data. While the system’s methodology is robust, the companies surveyed were not satisfied with its accuracy. Thus, they sought out new, optimized solutions. To confirm the results, the engines were used to return XML-based files with text and metadata identified. The output XML data was then fed into this new system for information extraction. This system uses the existing OCR engine and a novel, self-adaptive, learning-based OCR engine. This new engine is based on the GAN model for better text identification. Experiments were conducted on various invoice formats to further test and refine its extraction capabilities. For cost optimisation and the analysis of spend classification, additional data were provided by another company in London that holds expertise in reducing their clients' procurement costs. This data was fed into our system to get a deeper level of spend classification and categorisation. This helped the company to reduce its reliance on human effort and allowed for greater efficiency in comparison with the process of performing similar tasks manually using excel sheets and Business Intelligence (BI) tools.The intention behind the development of this novel methodology was twofold. First, to test and develop a novel solution that does not depend on any specific OCR technology. Second, to increase the information extraction accuracy factor over that of existing methodologies. Finally, it evaluates the real-world need for the system and the impact it would have on SCM. This newly developed method is generic and can extract text from any given invoice, making it a valuable tool for optimizing SCM. In addition, the system uses a template-matching approach to ensure the quality of the extracted information

China

The Chinese indirect tax system is on the eve of a major overhaul, with the integration of the VAT and business tax (BT) to start in select industries in Shanghai on January 1, 2012. This paper provides an overview of China\u27s idiosyncratic VAT as well as the BT as they stood towards the end of 2010. BT law and practice are discussed only in connection with select conceptual issues such as the exclusion from the VAT/BT base, place of supply, etc. This decision is based on the considerations that many of the legal issues arising under the VAT cannot be properly discussed in connection with a cascading tax like the BT (as the economics of a cascading tax would undermine much of the logic of VAT rules), and that, when planning the integration of the BT into the VAT, it is the existing VAT rules examined here that will have to undergo further review and \u27stress tests\u27

Matching Cost Against Revenue at Royalty Expenses

The recording of royalty expenses must not only be consistent but also complied with the principle of matching costs against revenue, especially in calculating taxable income. If all accounting principles are not met in recording the royalty expense, the tax authority will correct it  so that the royalty expenses cannot be deducted from taxable income. By using a case in a tax court in Indonesia, there is a taxpayer who does not meet the matching cost against revenue principle when recording royalty expenses. The taxpayer deducts these royalty expenses for the previous year in the current year because the amounts of these royalty expenses are known exactly in the current year. Even though the taxpayer's financial statements were audited and had an unqualified opinion, the Directorate General of Taxes (DGT) as the tax authority in Indonesia negated the royalty expenses as a deduction from taxable income. This paper finds that a net sales-based royalty fee scheme can be estimated at the end of the year and deducted from gross income without waiting for a certainty on the amount of royalty expense on invoices received in the coming year. The accounting records of the taxpayer are not proper so that some data or documents cannot be proven in the tax court. The method of recording in the financial statements with an unqualified opinion does not guarantee that the recording follows tax regulations, especially following Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)

Between Globalization and Internal Stability, the Resistible Internationalization of the Renminbi

China's RMB is becoming a major international currency. It has joined major international currencies and intends to continue its growth although it has not yet become a fully convertible currency. Its share in world trade, reserves remains limited. On the one hand, the increase in its international use is increasing, on the other hand the decline in trade, the accumulation of internal problems - decline in GDP growth, growing domestic debt - are leading the Chinese authorities to push back the opening of the capital account, to control interest rates. Social stability has become a priority.JEL Codes - E; F;

TRIE++: Towards End-to-End Information Extraction from Visually Rich Documents

Recently, automatically extracting information from visually rich documents (e.g., tickets and resumes) has become a hot and vital research topic due to its widespread commercial value. Most existing methods divide this task into two subparts: the text reading part for obtaining the plain text from the original document images and the information extraction part for extracting key contents. These methods mainly focus on improving the second, while neglecting that the two parts are highly correlated. This paper proposes a unified end-to-end information extraction framework from visually rich documents, where text reading and information extraction can reinforce each other via a well-designed multi-modal context block. Specifically, the text reading part provides multi-modal features like visual, textual and layout features. The multi-modal context block is developed to fuse the generated multi-modal features and even the prior knowledge from the pre-trained language model for better semantic representation. The information extraction part is responsible for generating key contents with the fused context features. The framework can be trained in an end-to-end trainable manner, achieving global optimization. What is more, we define and group visually rich documents into four categories across two dimensions, the layout and text type. For each document category, we provide or recommend the corresponding benchmarks, experimental settings and strong baselines for remedying the problem that this research area lacks the uniform evaluation standard. Extensive experiments on four kinds of benchmarks (from fixed layout to variable layout, from full-structured text to semi-unstructured text) are reported, demonstrating the proposed method's effectiveness. Data, source code and models are available

A Hoard of Unpaid Invoices: Dissecting Economies & Private Market Forces To Solve B2B Late Payments

The average small-to-medium-size business in the United States keeps just enough of a cash buffer to last 27 days worth of normal operational costs, but in 2016 81% of all B2B invoices were delayed at least 30 days or more past the due date of payment. Furthermore, in 2016, the average SMB held roughly $84,000 in unpaid accounts receivables, with that number also varying across industries. As an example, the average IT SMB held roughly$163k in unpaid accounts receivables, while the average transportation company held roughly $102k in the same. Yet we wonder why 50% of all SMBs close shop in under 5 years of their existence. Late business-to-business (B2B) payments are symbolic of rampant trade credit. The conditions surrounding the need, use, exploitation, and the legal protections to curb trade credit vary significantly across nations and business cultures. However, while cultural practices do have a way of impacting commerce, the various instances of late payments across the world have several other universal factors in common as well. In this paper, we take a look at some global economies and the particularities of practices influencing late payments within their borders. We then dissect their public policies in an effort to gauge the pressure points which they hope to address - as well as any noticeable impact such policies may have had on future payment practices. We then juxtapose our lessons from public policy against the impact of private market solutions and technologies aimed at resolving late payments, and use those contrasting images to better understand the various factors that may have been left unanswered in public policy. Finally, I use my experience dissecting and studying the impact of public legislation to craft and put forth policy proposals of my own - aimed at resolving the most common imbalances and exploits observed during the course of my study

Strategies for sustainable socio-economic development and mechanisms their implementation in the global dimension

The authors of the book have come to the conclusion that it is necessary to effectively use modern approaches to developing and implementation strategies of sustainable socio-economic development in order to increase efficiency and competitiveness of economic entities. Basic research focuses on economic diagnostics of socio-economic potential and financial results of economic entities, transition period in the economy of individual countries and ensuring their competitiveness, assessment of educational processes and knowledge management. The research results have been implemented in the different models and strategies of supply and logistics management, development of non-profit organizations, competitiveness of tourism and transport, financing strategies for small and medium-sized enterprises, cross-border cooperation. The results of the study can be used in decision-making at the level the economic entities in different areas of activity and organizational-legal forms of ownership, ministries and departments that promote of development the economic entities on the basis of models and strategies for sustainable socio-economic development. The results can also be used by students and young scientists in modern concepts and mechanisms for management of sustainable socio-economic development of economic entities in the condition of global economic transformations and challenges