Suchergebnisse

The paper provides an analysis and discussion of key structural implications of the 2007 and 2008 welfare and tax reforms in the Czech Republic. Based on a detailed micro-study of marginal and average effective tax rates for individuals at various points along the earnings curve, it concludes that while incentives to save and invest have improved, work incentives are being severely hampered by high marginal effective tax rates for low- and middle income individuals. The reforms also fail to address the most pressing fiscal concern: to put government finances on a sustainable path

The structure of Japan's corporate income tax system is broadly in line with those of other G7 countries. However, relatively high marginal and average effective tax rates prompt the question of whether adjustments should be considered to meet the objectives of promoting growth, investment and competitiveness in a revenue neutral manner. This paper discusses key issues and trade-off's related to changes in the corporate income tax system. It does not provide recommendations, but raises issues that could hopefully serve as useful inputs to the ongoing discussion and tax debate in Japan

How can an anthropology of digital technology contribute to our understanding of climate mitigating initiatives? Governments and private sector industries argue that climate mitigation must focus on "decoupling" economic growth from carbon emissions if we are to reduce climate impact while still maintaining a healthy economy. Most proponents of decoupling envisage that digitalization will play a central role in this operation. Critics, however, argue that IT has a large and often unacknowledged climate impact, while IT solutions also frequently bring new and unforeseen problems, particular or systemic. The challenge of decoupling is thus broader than the management of the relationship between the economy and the climate. As much as decoupling is about how we imagine that the climate crisis can be solved with technologies, trusting that they can create the changes we need, it is also about the cultural value of lifestyles that we do not want to change. Seeing the climate crisis from this perspective opens the door for an anthropology of digital technology, which allows us to approach decoupling as a matter of how sociocultural change is imagined in the spaces between IT, climate change and society. The article thus contributes to the qualitative social scientific literature on perceptions of change by focusing on some of the ways that implicit ideas of change are embedded in the promotion of digital technologies as solutions to climate change. In addition, it presents to a wider scientific audience the perspectives that an anthropologically inspired analytic may provide on this topic.

This article contributes to debates about how capitalist corporations
'see', and how they concurrently relate to the places where they
are located. It argues that an analytical focus on 'seeing' illuminates how
internal organization and outward relation making are tied together in
complex ways. Even so, corporations of the extractive industries in particular
cannot be assumed to encompass a single coherent view. The empirical
case is a critical examination of how a gas project employed strict
health, safety, and security measures to generate order when encountering
alterity in an unfamiliar environment in Papua New Guinea. It reveals
how the project was organized around two conflicting ways of seeing its
host country—trying to separate itself from it while simultaneously having
to engage and provide benefits for it.

This article refers to carbon valuation as the practice of ascribing value to, and assessing the value of, actions and objects in terms of carbon emissions. Due to the pervasiveness of carbon emissions in the actions and objects of everyday lives of human beings, the making of carbon offsets and credits offers almost unlimited repertoires of alternatives to be included in contemporary carbon valuation schemes. Consequently, the article unpacks how discussions of carbon valuation are interpreted through different registers of alternatives - as the commensuration and substitution of variants on the one hand, and the confrontational comparison of radical difference on the other. Through the reading of a wide selection of the social science literature on carbon markets and trading, the article argues that the value of carbon emissions itself depends on the construction of alternative, hypothetical scenarios, and that emissions have become both a moral and a virtual measure pitting diverse forms of actualised actions or objects against each other or against corresponding nonactions and non-objects as alternatives.