Federal Road Charge Tax Administration Process

The gasoline tax is one of the primary sources of revenue for transportation infrastructure funding. However, recent revenue shortfalls due to a combination of inflation, fuel efficiency improvements, and vehicle electrification have led to discussions of alternative funding mechanisms such as the road user charge where drivers would pay fees by miles driven rather than gallons consumed. In this report, researchers investigate the institutional structure of the current gasoline tax at the federal level including historical changes, how the tax is collected, and how it is allocated and disbursed to fund infrastructure projects. In outlining the structure of the current gasoline tax, they identify key opportunities for a road user charge to be integrated into the current funding system. These include considerations for tax evasion, simplification of state level allocated disbursement formulas, re-allocation of funds, and designating spending for fuel-specific infrastructure.View the NCST Project Webpag

Using a Census to Assess the Reliability of a National Household Survey for Migration Research: The Case of Ireland

Much research has been conducted on immigration into Ireland in recent years using data from the Quarterly National Household Survey (QNHS), the official source for labour market data in Ireland. As it is known that the QNHS undercounts immigrants in Ireland, a concern exists over whether the profile of immigrants being provided is accurate. For example, QNHS-based research has shown that immigrants in Ireland are a highly educated group. However, if it is the case that those who are missed by the QNHS are more heavily drawn from among low-skilled immigrants, then the profile being reported and used in other research may be inaccurate. In this paper, we use the Irish Census of 2006 to assess the reliability of the profile of immigrants provided by the QNHS by comparing the characteristics of immigrants in both datasets. In general, we find that the QNHS does indeed provide a reliable picture and that earlier findings on the education levels of immigrants in Ireland hold.migration research, Ireland, census, household survey

The Impact of Ireland's Recession on the Labour Market Outcomes of its Immigrants

In the mid 2000s Ireland experienced a large inflow of immigrants, partly in response to strong economic growth but also in response to its decision to allow full access to its labour market when EU expansion occurred in May 2004. Between 2004 and 2007, the proportion of non-nationals living in Ireland almost doubled, increasing from 7.7 to 13.1 percent. Between 2008 and 2009, Ireland experienced one of the most acute downturns in economic activity in the industrialised world, with a cumulative fall in Gross National Product of close to 14 percent. In this paper, we assess how this downturn has impacted upon the employment outcomes of non-nationals relative to natives. We find huge job losses among immigrants, with an annual rate of job loss of close to 20 percent in 2009, compared to 7 percent for natives. A higher rate of job loss for immigrants is found to remain when we control for factors such as age and education. We also show how an outflow of non-nationals is occurring. The findings have many implications. In particular, the results point to economic vulnerability for immigrants. However, they also point to a potential macroeconomic benefit to Ireland in terms of a flexible labour supply adjustment.recession, Ireland, immigration

Deployment of quality assurance procedures for digital library programmes

Many digital library programmes have a development philosophy based on use of open standards. In practice, however, projects may not have procedures in place to ensure that project deliverables make use of appropriate open standards. In addition there will be occasions when open standards are not sufficiently mature for deployment in a service environment or use of open standards will require expertise or resources which are not readily available

The TRECVID 2007 BBC rushes summarization evaluation pilot

This paper provides an overview of a pilot evaluation of video summaries using rushes from several BBC dramatic series. It was carried out under the auspices of TRECVID. Twenty-two research teams submitted video summaries of up to 4% duration, of 42 individual rushes video files aimed at compressing out redundant and insignificant material. The output of two baseline systems built on straightforward content reduction techniques was contributed by Carnegie Mellon University as a control. Procedures for developing ground truth lists of important segments from each video were developed at Dublin City University and applied to the BBC video. At NIST each summary was judged by three humans with respect to how much of the ground truth was included, how easy the summary was to understand, and how much repeated material the summary contained. Additional objective measures included: how long it took the system to create the summary, how long it took the assessor to judge it against the ground truth, and what the summary's duration was. Assessor agreement on finding desired segments averaged 78% and results indicate that while it is difficult to exceed the performance of baselines, a few systems did

Estimating the Impact of Immigration on the Wages in Ireland

We estimate the impact of immigration on the wages of natives in Ireland applying the technique proposed by Borjas (2003). Under this method, the labour market is divided into a number of skill cells, where the cells are defined by groups with similar ages and levels of education (or age and occupation). Regression analysis is then employed to assess whether the average wages of natives across skill cells is affected by the share of immigrants across cells. When the cells are based on education/age, our results suggest a negative relationship between native wages and immigrant shares. However, the opposite appears to hold when the cells are based on occupation/age. These contradictory findings suggest that care should be exercised when applying this method as inaccurate impressions of the impact of immigration on wages may arise.

Value for money in schools: Report for the Audit Office

In January 2008, the Audit Commission appointed FGS, in association with the University of Southampton, to carry out a review in relation to Value for Money (VfM) in schools. Examining VfM in schools requires a detailed consideration of both the inputs and the outputs relating to the education system; in other words, the costs and benefits associated with schools. In this context, inputs are relatively straightforward to express: staffing typically represents around 70% of school costs, with the remainder comprising of operating and maintenance expenditure. However, defining the outputs from schools (pupil outcomes) is an altogether more complex task. The most tangible measure of pupil outcomes is the results they achieve in examinations. Even so, both in the UK and overseas, it is widely recognised that pupils’ levels of achievement are influenced by a range of factors other than the quality of schooling they receive (for example, their family background or their track record of achievement at earlier stages of their education). Put simply, pupils’ current levels of attainment are likely to be enhanced if they have a high level of prior educational attainment, and therefore schools may make a less significant contribution to student outcomes. In assessing the value for money which schools deliver through their day-to-day activities, it is therefore necessary to take account of the progress pupils make in their time at school (or ‘value added’ by the school), rather than just their levels of attainment, which are influenced by a host of factors other than schooling. <br/