Policies to harmonize value-added tax rates are controversial in the European Union. This paper formulates a multi-country model over a one-dimensional space as a non-cooperative Nash game, in which each country aims at maximizing its tax revenue, subject to the constraint that its tax rate lies within a given common band. Then we examine the e4ects of changes in the common band on tax rates, t...

The importance of standardization of laboratory test results has a long history traceable to the first proficiency testing results in 1947 that demonstrated large discrepancies among results from 59 hospital laboratories (1 ). The AACC published a series of monographs in 1953– 1972 titled Standard Methods of Clinical Chemistry that promoted a single measurement procedure (MP) for a measurand. T...

Measurement of glycohemoglobin (GHb) is widely used in patients with diabetes mellitus as a monitor of longterm glycemic control (1–3). In addition, prospective randomized clinical trials, most notably the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial (DCCT) and the United Kingdom Prospective Diabetes Study (UKPDS), have demonstrated that GHb is a measure of the risk for the development of diabetes ...

To validate the effectiveness of our joint training scheme, we also try an alternative of incorporating an off-the-shelf state-of-the-art scene parsing model [3] into our single encoder-decoder harmonization framework to provide semantic information. This network architecture is shown in Figure 1. We show quantitative comparisons on our synthesized dataset in Table 1 and 2. The MSE and PSNR of ...

By combining new data on bilateral asset holdings with data on securities regulation in an empirical gravity model, it is found that bilateral differences in securities regulation lead to decreased portfolio holdings. Hence, regulatory harmonization can foster financial integration. The results are especially strong for equity holdings. It is verified that the results do not just reflect genera...

The European Food Information Resource (EUROFIR) is a network of national Food Composition Databank (nFCDB) compilers that aims to develop, manage and publish food composition data and promote international cooperation and harmonization through improved data quality, database search ability and standards. The aim of this work is to study the role of metrology in harmonization of nFCDB. The crit...

We describe the automatic harmonization method used for building the English Silver Standard annotation supplied as a data source for the multilingual CLEF-ER named entity recognition challenge. The use of an automatic Silver Standard is designed to remove the need for a costly and time-consuming expert annotation. The final voting threshold of 3 for the harmonization of 6 different annotations...

The historical evolution of the corporate tax burden in the OECD nations is studied, beginning with an assessment of alternative measures of the burden. Descriptive analysis of these time series reveals no evidence of a competitive “race to the bottom” in capital taxation, and little evidence of even a harmonization of the tax burden. These conclusions for the OECD and Europe as a whole are con...