Applying tax policy models in country economic work : Bangladesh, China, and India

General principles can guide the design of the overall contours of a tax reform package to a considerable extent. This paper reports on the use of three tax policy models to analyze issues in the course of undertaking economic work with the regional departments in the World Bank's Operational Complex. The first model, that for Bangladesh, is used to demonstrate how the relative attractiveness of different revenue-raising options depends sensitively on the workings of labor markets and substitution relationships in production. The second model, that for China, emphasizes the importance of taking a system-wide view of taxation in a decentralizing socialist economy, where the coexistence of administered and free market prices for the same commodities can make standard tax reform prescriptions most inappropriate. The third model, that for India, examines the kinds of domestic tax adjustment that would be necessary in the wake of reductions in import tariffs in order to allow the government to continue to meet its real expenditures wihout any change in foreign borrowing, but taking into account changes in the prices of intermediates and capital goods resulting from tariff reform. The paper also discusses the costs involved in constructing and implementing tax policy models and summarizes the principal finding of the paper.Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management

Effective Image Database Search via Dimensionality Reduction

Image search using the bag-of-words image representa-tion is investigated further in this paper. This approach has shown promising results for large scale image collections making it relevant for Internet applications. The steps in-volved in the bag-of-words approach are feature extraction, vocabulary building, and searching with a query image. It is important to keep the computational cost low through all steps. In this paper we focus on the efficiency of the technique. To do that we substantially reduce the dimen-sionality of the features by the use of PCA and addition of color. Building of the visual vocabulary is typically done using k-means. We investigate a clustering algorithm based on the leader follower principle (LF-clustering), in which the number of clusters is not fixed. The adaptive nature of LF-clustering is shown to improve the quality of the visual vocabulary using this. In the query step, features from the query image are assigned to the visual vocabulary. The di-mensionality reduction enables us to do exact feature la-beling using kD-tree, instead of approximate approaches normally used. Despite the dimensionality reduction to be-tween 6 and 15 dimensions we obtain improved results com-pared to the traditional bag-of-words approach based on 128 dimensional SIFT feature and k-means clustering. 1

Sociologi og målgruppe. Nogle erfaringer med at operationalisere Bourdieu

Den franske sociolog Pierre Bourdieu har været em af mediefor- skernes største guruer siden midten af 1980´erne. Hans centrale begreber "habitus", "kapital", "smag" og "praksis" er belvet brugt og misbrugt af forskere og studerende, der havde brug for en ram- me, der kunne forklare sammenhængen mellem klasse, socialisia- tion og menneskers mangfoldige adfærd på det mediekulturelle om- råde. Bourdieus appel har bl. a. bestået i, at han konsekvent har bestræbt sig på ikke at falde i nogen af de traditionelle sociologiske grøfter: subjektivisme/objektivisme, determinisme/voluntarisme, osv. Samtidig er der inden for den kommercielle medieforskning opstået en voksende skepsis over for de klassiske demografiske faktorers forklaringskraft i forhold til f.eks. markedsføring. I stedet har man udviklet analysemodeller, der i første omgang udelukkende katego- riserer mennesker ud fra deres livsværdier (f.eks. den såkaldte RISC-model). Sociologen Henrik Dahl har i en årrække været fas- cineret af de slående ligheder mellem Bourdieus teorier og RISC- analysen. I denne artikel fremlægger han for første gang sit arbejde med at sammentænke disse tilgange teoretisk og empirisk. Efter en præsentation af RISC-analysen gennemprøves den i forhold til Bour- dieus nøglebegreber. Desuden sætter artiklen med rammende ka- rakteristikker nutidigt dansk kød og blod på den Bourdieuske kultur- analyse, hvis anvendelse i en dansk sammenhæng hidtil har været begrænset af dens oprindelse i 1960´ernes Frankrig