Benefit incidence analysis in developing countries

As interesting and difficult as it is to allocate tax burdens to individuals, the profession knows even less about allocating benefits. The authors survey the literature on benefit incidence since DeWulf's (1975) review, focusing on the methodology and results of benefit incidence analysis in developing countries. Research in this area faces all the general-equilibrium difficulties faced by tax incidence analysis as well as the difficult task of measuring benefits from publicly provided goods and services. Despite the inherent pitfalls of this methodology, the authors believe that benefit incidence analysis can provide an important perspective on the budget by combining data on household use with data on project costs. In particular, benefit incidence analyses can help illuminate the distributional impacts of proposed reallocations of government resources among projects. The value of such research is especially high considering the scarcity of recent research in this area. The authors review the existing methodology, survey the available results, and point out areas in which further research might have large payoffs. They also make specific methodological suggestions that might help ensure that future research is as useful for policymakers as possible. For example: Aggregate results based on the zero-government counterfactual rely on strong assumptions about fixed relative prices and incomes, government efficiency, and the relationship between marginal and total benefits. And those studies are often not designed to identify which types of public services benefit the poor. Researchers should focus more on providing benefit incidence studies on specific government functions or programs that can help policymakers reach conclusions about proposed reallocations of resources among government programs. Benefit incidence should be assigned to households based on household survey information on usage rather than on ad hoc assumptions that assign benefits based on income or the number of members in the household. Improved annual cost measures for services need to be developed, particulary for capital inputs. Researchers should group households by deciles and whenever possible should consider other groupings based on household income adjusted for household composition, age, location, and other relevant socioeconomic variables. Careful attention to life-cycle benefits, benefit shifting, rent-seeking, out-of-pocket costs, displacement of private sector efforts, average versus marginal incidence, and several other issues can significantly increase the value of benefit incidence analysis to policymakers.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Poverty Assessment,Health Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform

Stoking the Fires? Co2 Emissions and Economic Growth

Over the past decade, concern over potential global warming has focused attention on the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and there is an active debate concerning the desirability of reducing emissions. At the heart of this debate is the future path of both greenhouse gas emissions and economic development among the nations. We use global panel data to estimate the relationship between per capita income and carbon dioxide emissions, and then use the estimated trajectories to forecast global emissions of CO2. The analysis yields four major results. First, the evidence suggests a diminishing marginal propensity to emit (MPE) CO2 as economies develop; a result masked in analyses that rely on cross-section data alone. Second, despite the diminishing MPE, our forecasts indicate that global emissions of CO2 will continue to grow at an annual rate of 1.8 percent. Third, continued growth stems from the fact that economic and population growth will be most rapid in the lower-income nations that have the highest MPE. For this reason, there will be an inevitable tension between policies to control greenhouse gas emissions and those toward the global distribution of income. Finally, our sensitivity analyses suggest that the pace of economic development does not dramatically alter the future annual or cumulative flow of CO2 emissions.

Performance comparison of high speed microchannel plate photomultiplier tubes

The transit time spread characteristics of high speed microchannel photomultipliers has improved since the upgrade of the NASA CDSLR network to MCP-PMT's in the mid-1980's. The improvement comes from the incorporation of 6 micron (pore size) microchannels and offers significant improvement to the satellite ranging precision. To examine the impact on ranging precision, two microchannel plate photomultiplier tubes (MCP-PMT) were evaluated for output pulse characteristics and temporal jitter. These were a Hamamatsu R 2566 U-7 MCP-PMT (6 micron) and an ITT 4129f MCP-PMT (12 micron)

Test results from LAGEOS-2 optical characterization using pulsed lasers

The Laser Geodynamic Satellite-2 (LAGEOS-2) has undergone extensive optical testing at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center during 1989. The techniques included measuring the far field diffraction pattern using cw and pulsed lasers. In the pulsed measurement technique, response of the satellite was studied by measuring the far-field diffraction pattern (FFDP) as a function of pulsewidth, wavelength, polarization, position in the FFDP, detector/processing techniques, and satellite orientation. The purpose of the pulsed laser testing was two-fold: (1) to characterize the satellite optical response with the detector and signal processing electronics currently used in most SLR stations using the portable laser ranging standard, and (2) to characterize the satellite response for various conditions using the highest bandwidth optical detector (streak camera) available for the next generation of satellite laser ranging (SLR) technology. The portable ranging standard employed multiple measurement devices and an optical calibration scheme to eliminate range-dependent and amplitude-dependent systematics. These precautions were taken to eliminate/minimize instrumental errors and provide maximum accuracy. For LAGEOS orbit (6000 Km), ground stations are located 34 to 38 Mu radians off the axis of the return signal from the satellite; therefore, an optical mask was used to restrict the field of view (FOV) of detection to this annular region of the FFDP. The two measurement techniques were implemented using an aperture sharing scheme and complemented each other by providing mutual verification

Preliminary results from the portable standard satellite laser ranging intercomparison with MOBLAS-7

Conventional Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) instrumentation has been configured and successfully used to provide high-accuracy laboratory measurements on the LAGEOS-2 and TOPEX cube-corner arrays. The instrumentation, referred to as the Portable Standard, has also been used for field measurements of satellite ranges in tandem with MOBLAS-7. Preliminary results of the SLR measurements suggest that improved range accuracy can be achieved using this system. Results are discussed

Streak camera based SLR receiver for two color atmospheric measurements

To realize accurate two-color differential measurements, an image digitizing system with variable spatial resolution was designed, built, and integrated to a photon-counting picosecond streak camera, yielding a temporal scan resolution better than 300 femtosecond/pixel. The streak camera is configured to operate with 3 spatial channels; two of these support green (532 nm) and uv (355 nm) while the third accommodates reference pulses (764 nm) for real-time calibration. Critical parameters affecting differential timing accuracy such as pulse width and shape, number of received photons, streak camera/imaging system nonlinearities, dynamic range, and noise characteristics were investigated to optimize the system for accurate differential delay measurements. The streak camera output image consists of three image fields, each field is 1024 pixels along the time axis and 16 pixels across the spatial axis. Each of the image fields may be independently positioned across the spatial axis. Two of the image fields are used for the two wavelengths used in the experiment; the third window measures the temporal separation of a pair of diode laser pulses which verify the streak camera sweep speed for each data frame. The sum of the 16 pixel intensities across each of the 1024 temporal positions for the three data windows is used to extract the three waveforms. The waveform data is processed using an iterative three-point running average filter (10 to 30 iterations are used) to remove high-frequency structure. The pulse pair separations are determined using the half-max and centroid type analysis. Rigorous experimental verification has demonstrated that this simplified process provides the best measurement accuracy. To calibrate the receiver system sweep, two laser pulses with precisely known temporal separation are scanned along the full length of the sweep axis. The experimental measurements are then modeled using polynomial regression to obtain a best fit to the data. Data aggregation using normal point approach has provided accurate data fitting techniques and is found to be much more convenient than using the full rate single shot data. The systematic errors from this model have been found to be less than 3 ps for normal points

The small house : making more out of less, a study of space use and perception in dwellings

Thesis (M.Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1980.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH.Bibliography: leaves 77-78.by Thomas Randolph Selden.M.Arch

3D Scan Data for Selected Clovis-Age Artifacts from the Gault Site (41BL323)

On August 19, 2016, selected Clovis artifacts from the Gault site (41BL323) were scanned in advance of a large collaborative research project. These data were collected using a NextEngineHD running ScanStudioHD Pro, and were post-processed in Geomagic Design X 2016.0.1. All data associated with this project have been made publicly available (open access) and are accessible in Zenodo under a Creative Commons Attribution license, where they can be downloaded for use in additional projects and learning activities. These data have the capacity to augment a variety of research designs spanning the digital humanities, applications of geometric morphometrics, and many others. Additionally, these scans will augment a wide range of comparative research topics throughout the Americas and beyond. Reuse potential for these data is significant

3D Scan Data for Selected Clovis-Age Artifacts from the Gault Site (41BL323)

On August 19, 2016, selected Clovis artifacts from the Gault site (41BL323) were scanned in advance of a large collaborative research project. These data were collected using a NextEngineHD running ScanStudioHD Pro, and were post-processed in Geomagic Design X 2016.0.1. All data associated with this project have been made publicly available (open access) and are accessible in Zenodo under a Creative Commons Attribution license, where they can be downloaded for use in additional projects and learning activities. These data have the capacity to augment a variety of research designs spanning the digital humanities, applications of geometric morphometrics, and many others. Additionally, these scans will augment a wide range of comparative research topics throughout the Americas and beyond. Reuse potential for these data is significant

Benefit incidence analysis in developing countries

As interesting and difficult as it is to allocate tax burdens to individuals, the profession knows even less about allocating benefits. The authors survey the literature on benefit incidence since DeWulf\u27s (1975) review, focusing on the methodology and results of benefit incidence analysis in developing countries. Research in this area faces all the general-equilibrium difficulties faced by tax incidence analysis as well as the difficult task of measuring benefits from publicly provided goods and services. Despite the inherent pitfalls of this methodology, the authors believe that benefit incidence analysis can provide an important perspective on the budget by combining data on household use with data on project costs. In particular, benefit incidence analyses can help illuminate the distributional impacts of proposed reallocations of government resources among projects. The value of such research is especially high considering the scarcity of recent research in this area. The authors review the existing methodology, survey the available results, and point out areas in which further research might have large payoffs. They also make specific methodological suggestions that might help ensure that future research is as useful for policymakers as possible. For example: Aggregate results based on the zero-government counterfactual rely on strong assumptions about fixed relative prices and incomes, government efficiency, and the relationship between marginal and total benefits. And those studies are often not designed to identify which types of public services benefit the poor. Researchers should focus more on providing benefit incidence studies on specific government functions or programs that can help policymakers reach conclusions about proposed reallocations of resources among government programs. Benefit incidence should be assigned to households based on household survey information on usage rather than on ad hoc assumptions that assign benefits based on income or the number of members in the household. Improved annual cost measures for services need to be developed, particulary for capital inputs. Researchers should group households by deciles and whenever possible should consider other groupings based on household income adjusted for household composition, age, location, and other relevant socioeconomic variables. Careful attention to life-cycle benefits, benefit shifting, rent-seeking, out-of-pocket costs, displacement of private sector efforts, average versus marginal incidence, and several other issues can significantly increase the value of benefit incidence analysis to policymakers