The Computation and Comparison of the Effective Tax Burden in Four Asian Countries

The Asia-Pacific region has gained economic power among the world's economies and offers enormous sales opportunities for multinational companies. When considering foreign direct investment in countries from this region, the specific taxation framework constitutes one determinant to be accounted for. The paper provides a comparative analysis of the corporate tax regimes in four important Asian countries, namely China, India, Japan and Singapore. It is not limited to a comprehensive description of the tax systems, but goes to a detailed analysis of the effective average tax burden, which is relevant for investors' decisions on location, scale and mode of finance of a potential investment. The calculation is based on the European Tax Analyzer. This approach allows capturing different types of taxes borne by corporations, the respective tax bases and tax rates in great detail and hence extends the literature on company taxation in Asia. In addition, we seek to contribute to literate not only by establishing a country ranking based on the overall tax burden, but also by identifying the underlying tax drivers. In doing so, sensitivity analyses are run to examine the effects of altering model assumptions, thereby illustrating the sensitivity of the base case results to selected financial ratios. As corporate income taxes might affect investments in various industry sectors differently, the comparison of the effective average tax burdens is finally extended to corporations representing different industries.Effective Average Tax Burden, European Tax Analyzer, Asia

Book-tax conformity: empirical evidence from Germany

We use a unique matched tax return - financial statement data set to examine the magnitude and sources of book-tax differences in Germany. For the first time, the data set enables us to evaluate the extent to which financial and tax accounting differ in Germany in the most accurate manner. Despite the close link between financial and tax accounting in Germany, we find that corporate taxable income and income reported to shareholders diverge considerably. Regression results suggest that this reporting gap is largely attributable to legal differences between financial and tax accounting and we cannot provide evidence that tax aggressive reporting adds to it. However, further analyses show that firms actively engaged in corporate restructuring exhibit larger book-tax differences than other firms. We interpret this result as evidence of firms willing to give up the administrative advantages of a one-book accounting system in order to achieve desired tax or financial accounting result, if book-tax conformity is not required. Thus, the results not only provide insights into the relatively unexplored area of behavioral response to changes in the degree of book-tax conformity, but also add a new perspective to the discussion surrounding the implementation of the German Accounting Law Modernization Act (BilMoG) in 2010

Romania's development to a low-tax country: Effective corporate tax burden in Romania from 1992 to 2010 and Romania's current ranking among the eastern European member states

We trace back Romania's development to a low-tax country among the Member States of the European Union by analysing the major tax law changes in corporate taxation since 1992. We find that the significant reduction of the corporate income tax rate from 45% in 1992 to 16% since 2005 has not been accompanied by a comprehensive broadening of the corporate income tax base as prevalent in many longstanding Member States of the EU and the OECD. Our analysis is not limited to a comprehensive description of the development of corporate taxation in Romania, but goes on with a numerical analysis of the tax burdens at different periods of time which constitute milestones in the development of corporate taxation in Romania. For this purpose, we apply the European Tax Analyzer, which is a computer-based model firm approach. We find that the average company tax burden of the underlying model company has dropped significantly by almost 65% since 1992. Furthermore, our numerical analysis does not confirm the tax base broadening policy. As a result, Romania holds position two among the group of Central and Eastern European EU Member States. --corporate taxation,effective tax burden,transition economy,EU accession countries,tax reform,tax-rate-cum-base-broadening reform

Cooling of high power density electrical drive units for mobile machinery

In this proceeding the demand for a high power density of drives in mobile machinery and their constraints are described. To achieve a high power density with electrical machines liquid cooling is a favoured option. Usually it is state of the art to use cooling jackets in those machines due to manufactureability and robustness. The behaviour of often used rectangular channel structures is well known and can be described with basic thermodynamics. Possible improvements by using vortex generators inside the channel of a cooling jacket structure are discussed. A basic dimple geometry is shown and also evaluated for a cooling spiral

Synthesizing Nested Relational Queries from Implicit Specifications

Derived datasets can be defined implicitly or explicitly. An implicit definition (of dataset $O$ in terms of datasets $\vec{I}$) is a logical specification involving the source data $\vec{I}$ and the interface data $O$. It is a valid definition of $O$ in terms of $\vec{I}$, if any two models of the specification agreeing on $\vec{I}$ agree on $O$. In contrast, an explicit definition is a query that produces $O$ from $\vec{I}$. Variants of Beth's theorem state that one can convert implicit definitions to explicit ones. Further, this conversion can be done effectively given a proof witnessing implicit definability in a suitable proof system. We prove the analogous effective implicit-to-explicit result for nested relations: implicit definitions, given in the natural logic for nested relations, can be effectively converted to explicit definitions in the nested relational calculus NRC. As a consequence, we can effectively extract rewritings of NRC queries in terms of NRC views, given a proof witnessing that the query is determined by the views