Transport Policy, Acceptance and the Media

The last two decades have seen a substantial change in the basic philosophy underlying European transportation policy. Due to the Commission's efforts and due to supporting jurisdiction by the European Court of Justice the dominant approach to transportation policy has become far more market oriented. This change of approach in transportation policy will only be successful and sustainable if the problem of acceptability will be solved. For researchers this entails that their perspective must change from the normative to the positive aspects of transportation policy-making. This paper reports work undertaken within research project TIPP (Transportation Institutions in the Policy Process) funded by the European Commission. In this work it has been attempted to develop a theoretical structure that merges the positive economic theory of regulation with cognitive psychology and traffic psychology. This theoretical structure offers a matrix of actors and factors that are seen to be essential for success or failure in the implementation of a certain measure of transport policy. Four case studies were carried out in order to check the plausibility of this approach. The case studies are the failure of the German Railway (Deutsche Bahn AG) to introduce a new tariff system in passenger transport in the period 2002-2003, the attempt to introduce a toll for HGVs in Germany, the failure to operate a private tolled motorway in Hungary (M1/M15), the failure to introduce a road-pricing system in the densely populated Randstad area in the Netherlands. --Transportation Policy,Europe,Common Transport Policy,Transport Regulation,Acceptability

Fiscal federalism - an international comparison

In federal systems, the powers and responsibilities must be divided up between central government and individual states in such a way as to enable the center effectively to carry out its duties for the nation as a whole, while allowing the lower levels of government to pursue their own regional goals at the same time. Thus, the main challenge is to find the best way to combine the advantages and disadvantages of centralization and decentralization respectively. In principle, there are two opposing normative models of organizing domestic fiscal relations. The first of these models is primarily inspired by distributive goals. Accordingly, revenue sharing is used as a tool to adjust "unequal" living conditions. This approach is exemplified by Germany, where the federal division of labor allows the lower levels of government very little discretion with regard to generating revenue. On the expenditure side, the system is characterized by an elaborate framework of domestic fiscal relations. Frequently, powers and responsibilities are shared by various levels of government, which regulary results in lengthy negotiations before the necessary broad-based consensus can be reached. There are many responsibilities that cannot be discharged independently. Equally, the extent of leveling is considerable

Fiscal federalism and financial resources for regional development - co-operative and competitive models : the international experience - an example for Russia?

In Western economies, the concrete design of fiscal federalism is determined by the status the federation grants to regionally comparable economic and social conditions, and to what extent this status is anchored in the constitution. If the political and social acceptance of regional differences is high, the significance of regional equalisation is low and vice versa. In the case of great regional differences fiscal equalisation could be overburdened by the task of reducing fiscal strength. Moreover, if the political and social acceptance is lacking, regional policy interventions of the federal level is appropriate to support the regional economic convergence rather than fiscal equalisation. However, in high-performing economies organized as federations, comparably weak institutions such as those in Russia are largely unknown. In this sense, international experience makes it clear that strong and well-designed institutional arrangements between the different governmental levels are an important precondition for a high-performing fiscal system. In other words, to take advantage of the potential efficiency gains offered by fiscal federalism, the vertical co-ordination of revenue and expenditure responsibilities between the different governmental levels should be clarified. Problems of destruction and enforcement should be eliminated and replaced by harmonization and co-operation

Transport Policy, Acceptance and the Media

The last two decades have seen a substantial change in the basic philosophy underlying European transportation policy. Due to the Commission's efforts and due to supporting jurisdiction by the European Court of Justice the dominant approach to transportation policy has become far more market oriented. This change of approach in transportation policy will only be successful and sustainable if the problem of acceptability will be solved. For researchers this entails that their perspective must change from the normative to the positive aspects of transportation policy-making. This paper reports work undertaken within research project TIPP (Transportation Institutions in the Policy Process) funded by the European Commission. In this work it has been attempted to develop a theoretical structure that merges the positive economic theory of regulation with cognitive psychology and traffic psychology. This theoretical structure offers a matrix of actors and factors that are seen to be essential for success or failure in the implementation of a certain measure of transport policy. Four case studies were carried out in order to check the plausibility of this approach. The case studies are the failure of the German Railway (Deutsche Bahn AG) to introduce a new tariff system in passenger transport in the period 2002-2003, the attempt to introduce a toll for HGVs in Germany, the failure to operate a private tolled motorway in Hungary (M1/M15), the failure to introduce a road-pricing system in the densely populated Randstad area in the Netherlands

Fiscal Federalism and Financial Resources for Regional Development - Co-operative and Competitive Models: The International Experience - an Example for Russia?

In Western economies, the concrete design of fiscal federalism is determined by the status the federation grants to regionally comparable economic and social conditions, and to what extent this status is anchored in the constitution. If the political and social acceptance of regional differences is high, the significance of regional equalisation is low and vice versa. In the case of great regional differences fiscal equalisation could be overburdened by the task of reducing fiscal strength. Moreover, if the political and social acceptance is lacking, regional policy interventions of the federal level is appropriate to support the regional economic convergence rather than fiscal equalisation. However, in high-performing economies organized as federations, comparably weak institutions such as those in Russia are largely unknown. In this sense, international experience makes it clear that strong and well-designed institutional arrangements between the different governmental levels are an important precondition for a high-performing fiscal system. In other words, to take advantage of the potential efficiency gains offered by fiscal federalism, the vertical co-ordination of revenue and expenditure responsibilities between the different governmental levels should be clarified. Problems of destruction and enforcement should be eliminated and replaced by harmonization and co-operation.Fiscal federalism, Russia, regional policy, fiscal equalisation, tax policy

Entwicklung der Steuersysteme im internationalen Vergleich: kein Trend zu einer stärkeren Verbrauchsbesteuerung

Es gibt Anzeichen für einen Steuerwettbewerb zwischen den Nationalstaaten um mobile Produktionsfaktoren: Viele OECD-Länder haben über einen längeren Zeitraum die Steuersätze auf Unternehmens- und Kapitaleinkommen sowie diejenigen auf hohe Arbeitseinkommen gesenkt. Insgesamt lässt sich im Vergleich der hier ausgewählten Länder allerdings eine systematische Aushöhlung oder ein Bedeutungsverlust der direkten Steuern nicht erkennen. Die in den meisten Ländern durchgeführten Reformen waren in erster Linie darauf gerichtet, über eine neutralere Besteuerung die Leistungsanreize zu erhöhen und die Lenkungswirkungen zu verringern. Der Abbau von Vergünstigungen bzw. die Verbreiterung der Bemessungsgrundlagen und die Verminderung der Steuertarife waren fast überall die Rezepte, wobei die Reformen teilweise von Nettoentlastungen begleitet wurden. Es gibt zudem keine grundlegenden Hinweise darauf, dass Veränderungen beim Verhältnis von direkten und indirekten Steuern nennenswerte Wirkungen auf die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung haben. Ein Ausstieg aus der direkten Besteuerung oder ein konsequenter Umbau zu einer stärkeren verbrauchsorientierten Besteuerung deuten sich nicht an. In diesem Bericht wird der Frage nachgegangen, welche Entwicklungslinien im Vergleich der Steuersysteme Deutschlands und wichtiger OECD-Länder zu erkennen sind und welche Motive den Änderungen zugrunde liegen

Interpretable detection of novel human viruses from genome sequencing data

Viruses evolve extremely quickly, so reliable meth- ods for viral host prediction are necessary to safe- guard biosecurity and biosafety alike. Novel human- infecting viruses are difficult to detect with stan- dard bioinformatics workflows. Here, we predict whether a virus can infect humans directly from next- generation sequencing reads. We show that deep neural architectures significantly outperform both shallow machine learning and standard, homology- based algorithms, cutting the error rates in half and generalizing to taxonomic units distant from those presented during training. Further, we develop a suite of interpretability tools and show that it can be applied also to other models beyond the host pre- diction task. We propose a new approach for con- volutional filter visualization to disentangle the in- formation content of each nucleotide from its contri- bution to the final classification decision. Nucleotide- resolution maps of the learned associations between pathogen genomes and the infectious phenotype can be used to detect regions of interest in novel agents, for example, the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, unknown before it caused a COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. All methods presented here are implemented as easy- to-install packages not only enabling analysis of NGS datasets without requiring any deep learning skills, but also allowing advanced users to easily train and explain new models for genomics.Peer Reviewe