Taxing property in a neo-developmental state: The Politics of urban land value capture in Rwanda and Ethiopia

Of the African states experiencing sustained growth and poverty-reduction in recent decades, Rwanda and Ethiopia stand out due to the scope of their development visions and relatively effective state-driven transformation, leading them to be compared to the East Asian ‘developmental states’ with increased frequency. This article argues that these two states are better conceived as ‘neo-developmental’, due to important differences in the international and national constraints they face compared with the East Asian ‘tigers’. One effect of these differences is the difficulty of attracting investment into manufacturing industry, and the consequent concentration of capital in high-end urban real estate. This underscores the need for effective land value capture and property taxation, which featured strongly in the East Asian cases. Currently, however, both Rwanda and Ethiopia lack effective mechanisms for capturing the value of urban property in a way that is sustainable, redistributive and developmental. The article explores the politics of efforts to introduce property tax in both cases. It argues that property taxation has been obstructed by conflicting imperatives on land reform and tax reform, alongside resistance from vested interests created by the rapid generation of real estate-based wealth in the absence of other sufficiently lucrative investment options

'Double capture' and de-democratisation: Interest group politics and Uganda's 'transport mafia'

ABSTRACT This article analyses problems of interest representation and democratic consolidation, using a case study of the Uganda Taxi Operators and Drivers Association (UTODA). It shows how apparently representative organisational forms can exploit the majority of their members, bolstering the power of political-economic elites who straddle the statesociety divide, as well as how such organisations can undermine the foundations for democratic consolidation more broadly. Challenging conventional understandings of ‘state capture’, the paper argues that UTODA’s organisational power instead evolved through processes conceptualised as ‘double capture’: first, the government infiltrated the informal transport sector, but subsequently the transport organisation came to wield disproportionate influence over the state itself, with detrimental effects on both urban services and popular representation. The long-term domination by this authoritarian organisation meant that even after its downfall in 2011 there was little organisational capacity to build on in the sector, facilitating the reassertion of top-down governmental control

The mechanical deformation of single crystals of the alkali halides and its effect on their electrical properties

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Taxation, Property Rights and the Social Contract in Lagos

Major taxation reforms over the past decade have been interpreted as facilitating the transformation of Lagos: once widely seen as a city in permanent crisis, it is now seen by some observers as a beacon of megacity development. Most academic attention has focused on personal income taxation, which comprises the lion’s share of government revenue in Lagos. Less attention has been devoted to another crucial innovation over the same period – the Land Use Charge – and other forms of tax related to property. In this paper we show how the story of property taxation in Lagos since the early 2000s is important, not only in terms of the enormous increase in collection, but because of the ways in which property-related taxes have helped to support personal income taxation and to solidify the fiscal contract between state and society more broadly. Moreover, we explore how the payment of the Land Use Charge is interpreted by taxpayers, and how it is used alongside a plethora of other documents and processes to try and shore up fragile claims to property. In a context of intensely insecure tenure, particularly but not exclusively at the lower ends of the socio-economic spectrum, both taxation and other kinds of formal and informal payments play a key role in efforts to incrementally build and solidify property rights

LoANs: Weakly Supervised Object Detection with Localizer Assessor Networks

Recently, deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance on the task of object detection and recognition. The reason for this success is mainly grounded in the availability of large scale, fully annotated datasets, but the creation of such a dataset is a complicated and costly task. In this paper, we propose a novel method for weakly supervised object detection that simplifies the process of gathering data for training an object detector. We train an ensemble of two models that work together in a student-teacher fashion. Our student (localizer) is a model that learns to localize an object, the teacher (assessor) assesses the quality of the localization and provides feedback to the student. The student uses this feedback to learn how to localize objects and is thus entirely supervised by the teacher, as we are using no labels for training the localizer. In our experiments, we show that our model is very robust to noise and reaches competitive performance compared to a state-of-the-art fully supervised approach. We also show the simplicity of creating a new dataset, based on a few videos (e.g. downloaded from YouTube) and artificially generated data.Comment: To appear in AMV18. Code, datasets and models available at https://github.com/Bartzi/loan

Complications of Prone Positioning During Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation for Respiratory Failure: A Systematic Review

BACKGROUND: Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is often used in patients with severe respiratory failure to improve oxygenation and survival. ECMO gives the lungs an opportunity to rest and recover. The addition of prone positioning therapy used concurrently with ECMO can further aid in optimizing alveolar recruitment and reducing ventilator-induced lung injury, ultimately resulting in fewer ICU admission days and improved overall survival. The objective of this review is to perform a systematic analysis of the complications reported with prone positioning and ECMO in the adult population and to briefly report on the patient outcomes in the studies. METHODS: PubMed, MEDLINE, Cochrane Library, and CINAHL were searched from January 1, 1960 to September 14, 2014. Studies were included if they examined both extracorporeal membrane oxygenation and prone positioning simultaneously for the treatment of respiratory failure in the adult population. RESULTS: Seven studies fit the study inclusion criteria (1 prospective cohort study, 3 retrospective cohort studies, and 3 case series). All of the studies in this review reported no occurrence of ECMO cannula dislodgment, and 2 studies reported cannula site bleeding. Chest tube dislodgment and airway dislodgment did not occur in any of the studies included. Bleeding from the chest tube site was reported in 13.5% of prone positioning maneuvers in 1 study, and the rest of the studies reported no evidence of chest tube site bleeding. Of the 2 studies that reported hemodynamic instability during the prone positioning maneuvers, very few adverse hemodynamic episodes were reported. The authors who reported adverse effects stated that the episodes were quickly and successfully reversible. CONCLUSIONS: This review highlights the limited complications documented during prone positioning and ECMO. More studies are needed to assess the clinical efficacy of the addition of prone positioning therapy to ECMO for patients in severe respiratory failure

The 30-kW ammonia arcjet technology

The technical results are summarized of a 30 kW class ammonia propellant arcjet technology program. Evaluation of previous arcjet thruster performance, including materials analysis of used thruster components, led to the design of an arcjet with improved performance and thermal characteristics. Tests of the new engine demonstrated that engine performance is relatively insensitive to cathode tip geometry. Other data suggested a maximum sustainable arc length for a given thruster configuration, beyond which the arc may reconfigure in a destructive manner. A flow controller calibration error was identified. This error caused previously reported values of specific impulse and thrust efficiency to be 20 percent higher than the real values. Corrected arcjet performance data are given. Duration tests of 413 and 252 hours, and several tests 100 hours in duration, were performed. The cathode tip erosion rate increased with increasing arc current. Elimination of power source ripple did not affect cathode tip whisker growth. Results of arcjet modeling, diagnostic development and mission analyses are also discussed. The 30 kW ammonia arcjet may now be considered ready for development for a flight demonstration, but widespread application of 30 kW class arcjet will require improved efficiency and lifetime

Taming the "Rogue" Sector: Studying State Effectiveness in Africa through Informal Transport Politics

Despite widespread reference in international development discourses to the importance of “effective states,” the meaning of effectiveness is often unclear. This article presents a theoretical framework for analyzing state effectiveness and evaluates it through a comparative empirical study. Focusing on efforts to regulate and tax the lucrative informal urban transport sector, it maps out the landscape of institutions and political interests that underpinned remarkably effective outcomes in Rwanda and serial failure in Uganda in the decade 2000–2010. The article argues that the divergent outcomes are not so much a function of differing bureaucratic capacity as the interaction between factors such as the credibility of government policies, sources of legitimacy, and the role of “infrastructural power,” and how these are mediated through differences in political space