Tax compliance costs of small business in Croatia

The paper measures the tax compliance costs of business units that pay personal income tax in Croatia for the period 2001/2002. They comprise all taxes, except custom duties. The regressive effect is proven, measured by different size measures. In the cost structure the cost of time, predominantly the owner’s time, is predominant. Concerning the type of tax, personal income tax and VAT are, in aggregate, of almost the same importance. As a percentage of GDP the tax compliance costs come to around 0.8%. The share of personal income tax compliance costs in the relevant tax revenues is extremely high (almost 100%), which calls for the substitution of self-assessment by lump sum (estimated) tax. Psychological cost of that tax does not seem to be significant. The share of VAT is also considerable (25% or at least 16%), calling for a higher exemption threshold

Algebraic theory of affine curvature tensors

We use curvature decompositions to construct generating sets for the space of algebraic curvature tensors and for the space of tensors with the same symmetries as those of a torsion free, Ricci symmetric connection; the latter naturally appear in relative hypersurface theory.Comment: The paper is dedicated to the memory of the first author (N. Blazic) who passed away Monday 10 October 200

Consumer-Based Taxation at the Business Level: The Croatian Experience

Croatia is the first country in the world to implement consumption-based direct taxation aimed at the individual as well as the business levels. Traditional corporate tax has been replaced by the so-called interest-adjusted profit tax , which encompasses the corporate as well as the non-corporate sector. This paper analyzes the efficiency of this tax in Croatia with regard to its neutrality as well as its cost-effectiveness. This tax can be regarded as neutral in terms of investment, finance, inflation and organizational form. But the imperfections of financial markets in Croatia still cause distortions between debt and equity capital as well as some distortions between the corporate and non-corporate sectors. The second efficiency aspect is identified as more doubtful, because of the relatively high tax expenditure of protective interest and incentive effects that have not been proven in practice

Geometry of Paraquaternionic Kahler manifolds with torsion

We study the geometry of PQKT-connections. We find conditions to the existence of a PQKT-connection and prove that if it exists it is unique. We show that PQKT geometry persist in a conformal class of metrics.Comment: 22 page

Analysis of adaptation law of the robust evolving cloud-based controller

In this paper we propose a performance analysis of the robust evolving cloud-based controller (RECCo) according to the different initial scenarios. RECCo is a controller based on fuzzy rule-based (FRB) systems with non-parametric antecedent part and PID type consequent part. Moreover, the controller structure (the fuzzy rules and the membership function) is created in online manner from the data stream. The advantage of the RECCo controller is that do not require any a priory knowledge of the controlled system. The algorithm starts with zero fuzzy rules (zero data clouds) and evolves/learns during the process control. Also the PID parameters of the controller are initialed with zeros and are adapted in online manner. According to the zero initialization of the parameters the new adaptation law is proposed in this article to solve the problems in the starting phase of the process control. Several initial scenarios were theoretically propagated and experimentally tested on the model of a heat-exchanger plant. These experiments prove that the proposed adaptation law improve the performance of the RECCo control algorithm in the starting phase

Robust evolving cloud-based controller in normalized data space for heat-exchanger plant

This paper presents an improved version and a modification of Robust Evolving Cloud-based Controller (RECCo). The first modification is normalization of data space in RECCo. As a consequence, some of the evolving and adaptation parameters become independent of the range of the process output signal. Thus the controller tuning is simplified which makes the approach more appealing for the use in practical applications. The data space normalization is general and is used with Euclidean norm, but other distance metrics could also be used. Beside the normalization new adaptation scheme of the controller gain is proposed which improves the control performance in the case of a negative initial error in starting phase of the evolving process. At the end, different simulation scenarios are tested and analyzed for further practical implementation of the Cloud-based controller into real environments. For that reason a detail simulation study of a plate heat exchanger is performed and different scenarios were analyzed