Suchergebnisse

It is vital to greatly reduce traffic noises emitted by motor vehicles during accelerating through determining limit values of noises and further improve technical specifications and comforts of these automobiles for automotive manufacturers. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) R51 regulations define the noise limits for all vehicle categories, which are kept updating, and these noise limits are implemented by governments all over the world; however, the automobile manufactures need to estimate future values of noise limits for developing their next-generation vehicles. In this study, a machine learning model using the back-propagation neural network (BPNN) approach is developed to determine noise limits of a vehicle during accelerating by using historic data and predict its noise limits for future revisions of the UNECE R51 regulations. The proposed prediction model adopts the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm which can automatically adapt its learning rate to train the model with input data, and at the same time randomly select the validation data and test data to verify the correlation and determine the accuracy of the prediction results. To showcase the proposed prediction model, acceleration noise limits from six historic data are used for training the model, and the noise limits at the seventh version can be predicted and validated. As the results achieve a required accuracy, vehicle noise limits in the next revision as the future eighth version can be predicted based on these data. It can be found that the obtained prediction results are much close to those noise limits defined in current regulations and negative error ratios are reduced significantly, compared to those values obtained using a quadratic regression model. As a result, the proposed BPNN model can predict future noise limits for the next revision of the UNECE R51automotive noise limit regulations.

Nach dem Kompromiss von Bundestag und Bundesrat über die Reform der Grundsteuer Ende 2019 erhalten die Länder Entscheidungsspielraum darüber, ob sie sich dem Bundesmodell anschließen oder ein eigenes Steuermodell entwickeln. Ein baden-württembergischer Gesetzentwurf sieht eine Bodenwertsteuer als alleinige Grundsteuer vor. Er verzichtet auf einen Gebäudeteil in der Grundsteuer, der in anderen Modellen und im Bundesvorschlag enthalten ist. Eine reine Bodenwertsteuer weist gegenüber dem Bundesvorschlag und anderen Vorschlägen deutliche Vorteile bei den Erhebungskosten auf. Allerdings führt der Verzicht auf den Gebäudeteil dazu, dass die Nutzung der Grundstücke nicht erfasst wird. Zudem ergeben sich aus der einseitigen Belastung der Grundstückseigentümer politische Risiken, die durch Vorgabe eines Höchsthebesatzes begrenzt werden sollten. ; Germany is currently reforming its municipal property tax. To simplify the assessment, some German states are considering a land-value tax as a practical alternative. The authors discuss the pros and cons and find some merit in the land-value tax. However, they suggest that states implement precursions to prevent excessive taxation, such as setting a maximum tax rate.

Die räumlichen Ungleichheiten in Deutschland und ihre politischen Auswirkungen haben die öffentliche Aufmerksamkeit wieder verstärkt auf die Gleichwertigkeit der Lebensverhältnisse gelenkt. Nachdem in den letzten Jahrzehnten der 'Aufbau Ost' ein zentraler Schwerpunkt war, öffnet sich nunmehr eine gesamtdeutsche Diskussion, die auch die Abkoppelung finanzschwacher Städte in Westdeutschland einschließt. Damit gewinnt die fiskalische Seite der Gleichwertigkeit an Bedeutung. ; The spatial inequalities in Germany have once again drawn public attention to the equivalence of living conditions. While the 'reconstruction of the East' has been a central focus over the last few decades, a Germany-wide discussion is now evolving that also includes the decoupling of financially weak cities in West Germany. This means that the fiscal side of equivalence is gaining in importance. In addition to state aid for heavily indebted municipalities, the mix of tools used to address problems should also include financial relief in the social sector.

This paper, part of a larger project on governance and growth in Russia. It deals with the problems and priorities of the future development of primary producer regions of Russia. We design a regional strategy for socioeconomic development to 2025-2030. The analysis concerns growth and diversification of the economy of regions, where raw materials are abundant, in order to scale back the exploitation of mineral resources and diversify the economy. Almost all strategies involve a gradual change of the vector in the direction of modernization and diversification of the economy. We emphasize that the important role here is for a new regional policy. The paper examines regional financial resilience in Russia in the period following the global financial crisis. The level of risk is rising, as government emergency finance is withdrawn and regions face rising debt to cover even operational expenses, but "resource" regions seem securely well off, despite having been most affected by the financial crisis. This paper examines one region, Khanty-Mansiysk autonomous okrug (KhMAO), the largest "donor" to the federal budget, against the background of other mineral resource abundant regions. It traces developments since the dramatic budget reforms (late 1990s through 2005), including centralization of revenues and rationalized program expenditure (Alexeev and Weber 2013). It assesses regional budget and debt management in response to pressures from increased federal required expenditures, post-crisis withdrawal of subsidies, and the roll-out of new debt guidelines. It describes and explains KhMAO's stability and relative autonomy in these crisis conditions. The key questions are: Why are these "donor" regions, more affected by the crisis than others, also more resilient? Is Russia's growth core of regions financially stable because of federal intervention? How vulnerable is the resource region to future oil price shocks? Our findings are tenative, since there remain questions about transparency and soft budget constraints (Plekhanov 2006). We show federalism at its most cooperative: among other factors, regional collaborative action fosters flexible budgeting. In the longer run, the resilience of resource regions, such as KhMAO, with their overall steady growth, despite volatility in oil prices, arguably is due geopolitical factors, which attract energy producers and industrial giants other than in the oil sector, and the business environemnt, including steady maintenance of a higher standard of living and skills attracted in new clusters, which are supported by innovation-oriented budgets. The findings here, however, also include, even more fundamentally, an evolvinig cooperative federalist agenda, with groups of regions acting together to secure negotiated decisions on tax allocations and spending requirements. Supportive of the conclusion in Chebankova (2008), the term adaptive federalism applies to finance, and compels a rethinking of the concept of fiscal rigidity as applied to the Russian Federation.

This paper uses survival analysis to examine the time taken to carry out municipality amalgamation in Japan in terms of both forming the amalgamation committee and completing amalgamation. The results show that municipalities that depend on local allocation tax grants as a revenue source, those that have an incentive to become a city that has special administrative discretions, and those that jointly manage local services form a committee and complete amalgamation more quickly. Further, municipalities that have high local public debt tend not to form committees. These findings show that the central government's carrot-and-stick policy has strongly influenced municipality amalgamation.

When investigating the effects of federal grants on the behavior of lower-level governments, it is hard to defend the handling of grants as an exogenous factor affecting local governments; federal governments often set grants based on characteristics and performance of local governments. In this paper we make use of a discontinuity in the Swedish grant system in order to estimate the causal effects of general intergovernmental grants on local spending and local tax rates. The formula for the distribution of funds is used as an exclusion restriction in an IV-estimation. We find evidence of crowding-in, where federal grants are shifted to more local spending, but not to reduced local tax rates. Our results thus confirm a flypaper effect for Sweden.

This paper lays a foundation by reviewing the issues and the comparative dimensions of fiscal decentralisation in four subject countries - Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. It is divided into the following components. First, it briefly reviews the issues: the main points of the economic literature on the subject and the special challenges to the transition countries in bringing about subsidiarity or devolution. Second, it describes the institutional structures of sub-national government. Then it turns to a three-part review of statistics to compare the relative roles of central and sub-national governmental units in revenue and expenditures in both some EU countries and some transition countries. In Part IV of the paper revenue sources and sharing are examined. Part V examines central grants programs both for their overall roles and in tfirms of a special feature of the paper - the extent to which central government grants programs are regressive or progressive across a country's subnational units. Part VI then looks at the expenditure side and the extent to which functional programs are decentralised to local governments. The paper is concluded by considerations of the connections between the local public and private sector development, especially in tfirms of strengthening market agents in the transition.

Im September 2016 hatten die Finanzminister der Länder ein Modell für die Reform der Grundsteuer auf den Weg gebracht. Sie war notwendig geworden, nachdem der Bundesfinanzhof die alten Einheitswerte als Bemessungsgrundlage für die Grundsteuer verworfen hatte. Nach Widerstand aus Bayern und Hamburg wurde das Gesetzesvorhaben ausgesetzt und muss in der neuen Legislaturperiode wieder angestoßen werden. In diesem Beitrag werden verschiedene Reformmodelle in Hinblick auf die Belastung unterschiedlicher Gebäudetypen und ungenutzter Grundstücke untersucht. ; Due to the resistance of Hamburg and Bavaria, the last draft legislation for a property tax reform failed, which was launched by the Federal Council of the German states in autumn of 2016. Since the constitutional court is expected to declare the existing tax assessment rules as unconstitutional, the existing property tax might be suspended, if the property tax cannot be revised on time after the federal elections. With this background, the article first analyses feasible reform options. Moreover, for the first time, an exemplary analysis of the tax payable of these alternative models is provided for two different cities, in terms of their spatial economic structures. A proposal for a corresponding reform of the financial equalisation scheme is forwarded also.

When estimating a specification combining different influences on local public choice, three public issues of different ideological attributes were compared for two periods of Portuguese local government intervention: the beginning and the ending of one electoral cycle. The most exciting results of the paper are the significance of ideology at local level and the decline of its importance in the ending of the electoral cycle. There is also some evidence on the political influence of interest groups, especially in low visible issues. On the general issue, majority is also influent and fiscal illusion is found. Some preliminary panel data results including two electoral cycles are analyzed. JEL CLASSIFICATION: H42; H73; R51 KEYWORDS: Median Voter; Interest Groups; Ideology; Local Government, Opportunistic Political Cycle

This paper aims to discover the mechanism behind the positive correlation between local fiscal expenditure and industrial land price in China, a stylized fact discovered by bivariate and regression analyses. The model shows that if the positive externality of government expenditure on growth is sufficiently high, the local government has an incentive to increase public spending in exchange for the reduced demand for industrial land by charging a higher markup and driving up the industrial land price. Therefore, we observe a positive correlation between the local fiscal expenditure and industrial land price. (JEL D42, H72, R51)

The informal settlements in Butuan City, Philippines pose the intractable problem of housing and providing services for the urban poor. They exact tremendous costs to government infrastructure projects and the city as a whole. In this study, these costs are accounted for, particularly the costs the government will incur to compensate them for being displaced in the implementation of public infrastructure project. Primary data were collected through inventory of losses (IOL), socio-economic survey (SES) and the replacement cost surveys. Secondary data were obtained through key informant interviews with different stakeholders. The paper quantifies the costs of compensating them through replacement of their affected resources and providing resettlement. It also establishes different types of compensation to secure just terms for all parties. It presents a rich picture of how the informal settlers affect urban environment and the monetary and operational challenges they pose to the government and the society at large.

Do local improvements in infrastructure provision improve city competitiveness? What public finance mechanisms stimulate local infrastructure supply? And how do local efforts compare with national decisions of placing inter-regional trunk infrastructure? In this paper, we examine how the combination of local and national infrastructure supply improve city competitiveness, measured as the city's share of national private investment. For the empirical analysis, we collect city-level data for India, and link private investment decisions to infrastructure provision. We find that a city's proximity to international ports and highways connecting large domestic markets has the largest effect on its attractiveness for private investment. In comparison, the supply of local infrastructure services - such as municipal roads, street lighting, water supply, and drainage - enhance competitiveness, but their impacts are much smaller. Thus, while local efforts are important for competitiveness, they are less likely to be successful in cities distant from the country's main trunk infrastructure. In terms of financing local infrastructure, we find that a city's ability to raise its own source revenues by means of local taxes and user fees increases infrastructure supply, whereas as inter governmental transfers do not have statistically significant effects.

Die Gemeindefinanzen befinden sich auch aufgrund der in jüngster Zeit stark zurückgegangenen Gewerbesteuereinnahmen in einem schlechten Zustand. Angesichts dieser Situation rief die Bundesregierung im März letzten Jahres eine Kommission zur Reform der Gemeindefinanzen ein, die u.a. Vorschläge zur Modernisierung bzw. Ersetzung der Gewerbesteuer erarbeitete. Vertiefend behandelte die Kommission dabei zwei Modelle, das so genannte BDI/VCI-Modell und das so genannte Kommunalmodell. Prof. Dr. Martin Junkernheinrich, Universität Trier und Mitglied dieser Kommission, stellt diese Vorschläge im Einzelnen vor. Klaus Bräunig, BDI, und Alfons Kühn, DIHT, plädieren in ihren Beiträgen, entsprechend dem BDI/VCI-Modell, für die Ersetzung der Gewerbesteuer durch eine kommunale Einkommen- und Gewinnsteuer, während Prof. Dr. Albert J. Rädler, München, der Revitalisierung der Gewerbesteuer den Vorzug gibt. Prof. Dr. Lorenz Jarass, Fachhochschule Wiesbaden und ebenfalls Mitglied der Kommission, schlägt einen schrittweisen Übergang von der Gewerbesteuer zu einer kommunalen Betriebssteuer vor.

Das Bundeskabinett hat am 27. März 2002 der Einrichtung einer Kommission zur Reform der Gemeindefinanzen zugestimmt. Im Mittelpunkt ihrer Arbeit sollen die Zukunft der Gewerbesteuer sowie die finanziellen Folgen einer effizienteren Abstimmung von Sozial- und Arbeitslosenhilfe für die Gebietskörperschaften stehen. Zur Zukunft der Gewerbesteuer liegen eine Reihe neuerer Vorschläge vor. Lothar Schemmel, stellvertretender Leiter des Karl-Bräuer-Instituts fasst in diesem Artikel die Argumente für eine Forderung nach Abbau der Gewerbesteuer, die das Karl-Bräuer-Institut geäußert hat, zusammen.