6,706 research outputs found
Evaluating the Relative Impact of Fiscal Incentives and Trade Policies on the Returns to Manufacturing in Taiwan 1955-1995
In this paper, an integrated cash flow model is developed to examine the relative impact of tax incentives, financial subsidies, and macroeconomic variables on the profitability of industrial investments. It allows for various variables to interact with each other. An application of the model is carried out for Taiwan, which implemented a variety of fiscal incentives over the past forty years. The principal policy conclusion is that trade and macroeconomic policies are much more important than income tax incentives or subsidized finance policies in determining the success of industrialization process. The effects of any of the fiscal incentives are found generally much smaller than those of the trade policies or the fundamental trends in macroeconomic variables such as the movement of the real exchange rate and the real wage rate.tax incentives, export promotion, industrialization, real exchange rate, trade policy, Taiwan
Evaluation of the benefits of transnational transportation projects
In this paper an analytical framework has been developed to evaluate the primary beneficiaries of cargo traffic generated by transnational transport projects. In the transportation economics literature, the economic impact of infrastructure projects on cargo traffic has not been developed as fully as for passenger traffic. In much of the previous literature it is often assumed that consumers of the traded goods would receive the full benefits from the reduction in logistics and transportation costs. This paper has shown that whether the goods are traded internationally or regionally is a key factor in the allocation of the economic benefits arising from the reduction in the cost of cargo transportation. The analytical framework developed in the paper is applied to the evaluation of the impacts of the proposed Buenos Aires-Colonia binational bridge project.Argentina, Uruguay, cargo traffic, transnational, transportation benefits
Cost-Benefit Analysis Case Study on Regulations to Lower the Level of Sulphur in Gasoline
The Canadian Cost-Benefit Analysis Guide: Regulatory Proposals, sets out the general methodology and analytical steps to perform a cost-benefit analysis of proposed regulatory changes. To make the Guide operational, this case study has been prepared following the analytical approach recommended by the Guide. In 1994, the sulphur content of Canadian gasoline was found to be high and varied widely across the country. Scientists and health experts have found evidence that emissions of pollutants from vehicles cause considerable harm to the health of Canadians and to the environment. In order to derive the net economic benefits, we integrate the economic benefits with the economic costs for each of the alternative scenarios. In the cost-benefit analysis, all private costs must be measured in terms of their economic opportunity costs. The results indicate that reducing the sulphur in gasoline for any scenario under consideration would generate substantial net health benefits or well-being for Canadians as a whole. Estimates of the net present value (at an eight percent discount rate) range from 2,663 million.Gasoline, Sulphur, Cost-Benefit, Environment
Is the Value Added Tax Naturally Progressive?
A broad based consumption tax, such as a value added tax, is generally considered to be a regressive tax. This conclusion, however, has not taken into account the fact that in developing countries the commodities on which poor households spend most of their income, even if they are included in the legal tax base, are administratively impractical to tax. This paper employs a rich data set on household incomes and expenditures for the Dominican Republic. The data set covers 2042 goods and services purchased by households of different income and consumption levels. It also contains information on the type of establishment from which the items were purchased. With this information, we estimate the effective rate of tax that has been paid on each item purchased by households. These estimations include the effect of the different rates of the tax compliance across households with different expenditure levels. The results of the study show that the burden of the current VAT in the Dominican Republic is progressive over all the quintiles of household expenditure. Furthermore, if the base of the VAT is made comprehensive, the estimated incidence of the burden of the VAT is still progressive over all the quintiles of household expenditure.Value Added Tax, incidence, compliance
A Semipersistent Plant Virus Differentially Manipulates Feeding Behaviors of Different Sexes and Biotypes of Its Whitefly Vector.
It is known that plant viruses can change the performance of their vectors. However, there have been no reports on whether or how a semipersistent plant virus manipulates the feeding behaviors of its whitefly vectors. Cucurbit chlorotic yellows virus (CCYV) (genus Crinivirus, family Closteroviridae) is an emergent plant virus in many Asian countries and is transmitted specifically by B and Q biotypes of tobacco whitefly, Bemisia tabaci (Gennadius), in a semipersistent manner. In the present study, we used electrical penetration graph (EPG) technique to investigate the effect of CCYV on the feeding behaviors of B. tabaci. The results showed that CCYV altered feeding behaviors of both biotypes and sexes of B. tabaci with different degrees. CCYV had stronger effects on feeding behaviors of Q biotype than those of B biotype, by increasing duration of phloem salivation and sap ingestion, and could differentially manipulate feeding behaviors of males and females in both biotype whiteflies, with more phloem ingestion in Q biotype males and more non-phloem probing in B biotype males than their respective females. With regard to feeding behaviors related to virus transmission, these results indicated that, when carrying CCYV, B. tabaci Q biotype plays more roles than B biotype, and males make greater contribution than females
Thermoelectric Power Generation for Heat Recovery in Automotive Industries
Researches on integrating thermoelectric power generator into various vehicle platform have witness a surge in solid demand of improving thermal efficiency and CO2 emission reduction from automotive industries. Many prototypes were built and tested in different segments of the car. Position at exhaust gas recirculation valve and downstream of catalyst are preferred by car manufacturers as easiness of installation. Up to 4% improvement of fuel economy has been claimed under an ideal road driving cycle. Much focuses on the lightweighting of the thermoelectric power generator whilst producing stable electric power output under an intermittent working load. However, major barriers to real application still exist due to low conversion efficiency of thermoelectric material and poor heat exchanger system design. Although heat source can be high up to 800Â K, actual temperature at thermoelectric legs are much less than that. Thermal losses are inevitable through the heat exchanger route and effectiveness of heat transfer become the key to system development in future. Thermoelectric material working in higher temperature could be a breakthrough and game changer for waste heat recovery in automotive industries
Resilient Distributed Parameter Estimation in Sensor Networks
In this paper, we study the problem of parameter estimation in a sensor
network, where the measurements and updates of some sensors might be
arbitrarily manipulated by adversaries. Despite the presence of such
misbehaviors, normally behaving sensors make successive observations of an
unknown -dimensional vector parameter and aim to infer its true value by
cooperating with their neighbors over a directed communication graph. To this
end, by leveraging the so-called dynamic regressor extension and mixing
procedure, we transform the problem of estimating the vector parameter to that
of estimating scalar ones. For each of the scalar problem, we propose a
resilient combine-then-adapt diffusion algorithm, where each normal sensor
performs a resilient combination to discard the suspicious estimates in its
neighborhood and to fuse the remaining values, alongside an adaptation step to
process its streaming observations. With a low computational cost, this
estimator guarantees that each normal sensor exponentially infers the true
parameter even if some of them are not sufficiently excited
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